Title: It Can't Happen Here (1935)
Author: Sinclair Lewis
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IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE

A Novel

by

SINCLAIR LEWIS

1935

1

The handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded
plaster shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had
been reserved for the Ladies' Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah
Rotary Club.

Here in Vermont the affair was not so picturesque as it might
have been on the Western prairies. Oh, it had its points: there
was a skit in which Medary Cole (grist mill & feed store) and
Louis Rotenstern (custom tailoring--pressing & cleaning)
announced that they were those historic Vermonters, Brigham Young
and Joseph Smith, and with their jokes about imaginary plural
wives they got in ever so many funny digs at the ladies present.
But the occasion was essentially serious. All of America was
serious now, after the seven years of depression since 1929. It
was just long enough after the Great War of 1914-18 for the young
people who had been born in 1917 to be ready to go to college . .
. or to another war, almost any old war that might be handy.

The features of this night among the Rotarians were nothing
funny, at least not obviously funny, for they were the patriotic
addresses of Brigadier General Herbert Y. Edgeways, U.S.A.
(ret.), who dealt angrily with the topic "Peace through
Defense--Millions for Arms but Not One Cent for Tribute," and of
Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch--she who was no more renowned for her
gallant anti-suffrage campaigning way back in 1919 than she was
for having, during the Great War, kept the American soldiers
entirely out of French cafés by the clever trick of
sending them ten thousand sets of dominoes.

Nor could any social-minded patriot sneeze at her recent
somewhat unappreciated effort to maintain the purity of the
American Home by barring from the motion-picture industry all
persons, actors or directors or cameramen, who had: (a) ever been
divorced; (b) been born in any foreign country--except Great
Britain, since Mrs. Gimmitch thought very highly of Queen Mary,
or (c) declined to take an oath to revere the Flag, the
Constitution, the Bible, and all other peculiarly American
institutions.

The Annual Ladies' Dinner was a most respectable
gathering--the flower of Fort Beulah. Most of the ladies and more
than half of the gentlemen wore evening clothes, and it was
rumored that before the feast the inner circle had had cocktails,
privily served in Room 289 of the hotel. The tables, arranged on
three sides of a hollow square, were bright with candles,
cut-glass dishes of candy and slightly tough almonds, figurines
of Mickey Mouse, brass Rotary wheels, and small silk American
flags stuck in gilded hard-boiled eggs. On the wall was a banner
lettered "Service Before Self," and the menu--the celery, cream
of tomato soup, broiled haddock, chicken croquettes, peas, and
tutti-frutti ice-cream--was up to the highest standards of the
Hotel Wessex.

They were all listening, agape. General Edgeways was
completing his manly yet mystical rhapsody on nationalism:

". . . for these U-nited States, a-lone among the great
powers, have no desire for foreign conquest. Our highest ambition
is to be darned well let alone! Our only gen-uine relationship to
Europe is in our arduous task of having to try and educate the
crass and ignorant masses that Europe has wished onto us up to
something like a semblance of American culture and good manners.
But, as I explained to you, we must be prepared to defend our
shores against all the alien gangs of international racketeers
that call themselves 'governments,' and that with such feverish
envy are always eyeing our inexhaustible mines, our towering
forests, our titanic and luxurious cities, our fair and far-flung
fields.

"For the first time in all history, a great nation must go on
arming itself more and more, not for conquest--not for
jealousy--not for war--but for peace! Pray God it may
never be necessary, but if foreign nations don't sharply heed our
warning, there will, as when the proverbial dragon's teeth were
sowed, spring up an armed and fearless warrior upon every square
foot of these United States, so arduously cultivated and defended
by our pioneer fathers, whose sword-girded images we must be . .
. or we shall perish!"

The applause was cyclonic. "Professor" Emil Staubmeyer, the
superintendent of schools, popped up to scream, "Three cheers for
the General--hip, hip, hooray!"

All the audience made their faces to shine upon the General
and Mr. Staubmeyer--all save a couple of crank pacifist women,
and one Doremus Jessup, editor of the Fort Beulah Daily
Informer, locally considered "a pretty smart fella but kind
of a cynic," who whispered to his friend the Reverend Mr. Falck,
"Our pioneer fathers did rather of a skimpy job in arduously
cultivating some of the square feet in Arizona!"

The culminating glory of the dinner was the address of Mrs.
Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, known throughout the country as "the
Unkies' Girl," because during the Great War she had advocated
calling our boys in the A.E.F. "the Unkies." She hadn't merely
given them dominoes; indeed her first notion had been far more
imaginative. She wanted to send to every soldier at the Front a
canary in a cage. Think what it would have meant to them in the
way of companionship and inducing memories of home and mother! A
dear little canary! And who knows--maybe you could train 'em to
hunt cooties!

Seething with the notion, she got herself clear into the
office of the Quartermaster General, but that stuffy
machine-minded official refused her (or, really, refused the poor
lads, so lonely there in the mud), muttering in a cowardly way
some foolishness about lack of transport for canaries. It is said
that her eyes flashed real fire, and that she faced the
Jack-in-office like Joan of Arc with eyeglasses while she "gave
him a piece of her mind that he never forgot!"

In those good days women really had a chance. They were
encouraged to send their menfolks, or anybody else's menfolks,
off to war. Mrs. Gimmitch addressed every soldier she met--and
she saw to it that she met any of them who ventured within two
blocks of her--as "My own dear boy." It is fabled that she thus
saluted a colonel of marines who had come up from the ranks and
who answered, "We own dear boys are certainly getting a lot of
mothers these days. Personally, I'd rather have a few more
mistresses." And the fable continues that she did not stop her
remarks on the occasion, except to cough, for one hour and
seventeen minutes, by the Colonel's wrist watch.

But her social services were not all confined to prehistoric
eras. It was as recently as 1935 that she had taken up purifying
the films, and before that she had first advocated and then
fought Prohibition. She had also (since the vote had been forced
on her) been a Republican Committee-woman in 1932, and sent to
President Hoover daily a lengthy telegram of advice.

And, though herself unfortunately childless, she was esteemed
as a lecturer and writer about Child Culture, and she was the
author of a volume of nursery lyrics, including the immortal
couplet:

All of the Roundies are resting in rows,With roundy-roundies around their toes.

But always, 1917 or 1936, she was a raging member of the
Daughters of the American Revolution.

The D.A.R. (reflected the cynic, Doremus Jessup, that evening)
is a somewhat confusing organization--as confusing as Theosophy,
Relativity, or the Hindu Vanishing Boy Trick, all three of which
it resembles. It is composed of females who spend one half their
waking hours boasting of being descended from the seditious
American colonists of 1776, and the other and more ardent half in
attacking all contemporaries who believe in precisely the
principles for which those ancestors struggled.

The D.A.R. (reflected Doremus) has become as sacrosanct, as
beyond criticism, as even the Catholic Church or the Salvation
Army. And there is this to be said: it has provided hearty and
innocent laughter for the judicious, since it has contrived to be
just as ridiculous as the unhappily defunct Kuklux Klan, without
any need of wearing, like the K.K.K., high dunces' caps and
public nightshirts.

So, whether Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch was called in to
inspire military morale, or to persuade Lithuanian choral
societies to begin their program with "Columbia, the Gem of the
Ocean," always she was a D.A.R., and you could tell it as you
listened to her with the Fort Beulah Rotarians on this happy May
evening.

She was short, plump, and pert of nose. Her luxuriant gray
hair (she was sixty now, just the age of the sarcastic editor,
Doremus Jessup) could be seen below her youthful, floppy Leghorn
hat; she wore a silk print dress with an enormous string of
crystal beads, and pinned above her ripe bosom was an orchid
among lilies of the valley. She was full of friendliness toward
all the men present: she wriggled at them, she cuddled at them,
as in a voice full of flute sounds and chocolate sauce she poured
out her oration on "How You Boys Can Help Us Girls."

Women, she pointed out, had done nothing with the vote. If the
United States had only listened to her back in 1919 she could
have saved them all this trouble. No. Certainly not. No votes. In
fact, Woman must resume her place in the Home and: "As that great
author and scientist, Mr. Arthur Brisbane, has pointed out, what
every woman ought to do is to have six children."

At this second there was a shocking, an appalling
interruption.

One Lorinda Pike, widow of a notorious Unitarian preacher, was
the manager of a country super-boarding-house that called itself
"The Beulah Valley Tavern." She was a deceptively Madonna-like,
youngish woman, with calm eyes, smooth chestnut hair parted in
the middle, and a soft voice often colored with laughter. But on
a public platform her voice became brassy, her eyes filled with
embarrassing fury. She was the village scold, the village crank.
She was constantly poking into things that were none of her
business, and at town meetings she criticized every substantial
interest in the whole county: the electric company's rates, the
salaries of the schoolteachers, the Ministerial Association's
high-minded censorship of books for the public library. Now, at
this moment when everything should have been all Service and
Sunshine, Mrs. Lorinda Pike cracked the spell by jeering:

"Three cheers for Brisbane! But what if a poor gal can't hook
a man? Have her six kids out of wedlock?"

Then the good old war horse, Gimmitch, veteran of a hundred
campaigns against subversive Reds, trained to ridicule out of
existence the cant of Socialist hecklers and turn the laugh
against them, swung into gallant action:

"My dear good woman, if a gal, as you call it, has any real
charm and womanliness, she won't have to 'hook' a man--she'll
find 'em lined up ten deep on her doorstep!" (Laughter and
applause.)

The lady hoodlum had merely stirred Mrs. Gimmitch into noble
passion. She did not cuddle at them now. She tore into it:

"I tell you, my friends, the trouble with this whole country
is that so many are selfish! Here's a hundred and twenty
million people, with ninety-five per cent of 'em only thinking of
self, instead of turning to and helping the responsible
business men to bring back prosperity! All these corrupt and
self-seeking labor unions! Money grubbers! Thinking only of how
much wages they can extort out of their unfortunate employer,
with all the responsibilities he has to bear!

"What this country needs is Discipline! Peace is a great
dream, but maybe sometimes it's only a pipe dream! I'm not so
sure--now this will shock you, but I want you to listen to one
woman who will tell you the unadulterated hard truth instead of a
lot of sentimental taffy, and I'm not sure but that we need to be
in a real war again, in order to learn Discipline! We don't want
all this highbrow intellectuality, all this book-learning. That's
good enough in its way, but isn't it, after all, just a nice toy
for grownups? No, what we all of us must have, if this great land
is going to go on maintaining its high position among the
Congress of Nations, is Discipline--Will Power--Character!"

She turned prettily then toward General Edgeways and
laughed:

"You've been telling us about how to secure peace, but come
on, now, General--just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns--'fess
up! With your great experience, don't you honest,
cross-your-heart, think that perhaps--just maybe--when a country
has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with
their propaganda to hoist income taxes, so that the thrifty and
industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne'er-do-weels, then
maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a
war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle
name, Mong General!"

Dramatically she sat down, and the sound of clapping filled
the room like a cloud of downy feathers. The crowd bellowed,
"Come on, General! Stand up!" and "She's called your bluff--what
you got?" or just a tolerant, "Attaboy, Gen!"

The General was short and globular, and his red face was
smooth as a baby's bottom and adorned with white-gold-framed
spectacles. But he had the military snort and a virile
chuckle.

"Well, sir!" he guffawed, on his feet, shaking a chummy
forefinger at Mrs. Gimmitch, "since you folks are bound and
determined to drag the secrets out of a poor soldier, I better
confess that while I do abhor war, yet there are worse things.
Ah, my friends, far worse! A state of so-called peace, in which
labor organizations are riddled, as by plague germs, with insane
notions out of anarchistic Red Russia! A state in which college
professors, newspapermen, and notorious authors are secretly
promulgating these same seditious attacks on the grand old
Constitution! A state in which, as a result of being fed with
these mental drugs, the People are flabby, cowardly, grasping,
and lacking in the fierce pride of the warrior! No, such a state
is far worse than war at its most monstrous!

"I guess maybe some of the things I said in my former speech
were kind of a little bit obvious and what we used to call 'old
hat' when my brigade was quartered in England. About the United
States only wanting peace, and freedom from all foreign
entanglements. No! What I'd really like us to do would be to come
out and tell the whole world: 'Now you boys never mind about the
moral side of this. We have power, and power is its own
excuse!'

"I don't altogether admire everything Germany and Italy have
done, but you've got to hand it to 'em, they've been honest
enough and realistic enough to say to the other nations, 'Just
tend to your own business, will you? We've got strength and will,
and for whomever has those divine qualities it's not only a
right, it's a duty, to use 'em!' Nobody in God's world
ever loved a weakling--including that weakling himself!

"And I've got good news for you! This gospel of clean and
aggressive strength is spreading everywhere in this country among
the finest type of youth. Why today, in 1936, there's less than 7
per cent of collegiate institutions that do not have
military-training units under discipline as rigorous as the
Nazis, and where once it was forced upon them by the authorities,
now it is the strong young men and women who themselves demand
the right to be trained in warlike virtues and skill--for,
mark you, the girls, with their instruction in nursing and the
manufacture of gas masks and the like, are becoming every whit as
zealous as their brothers. And all the really thinking
type of professors are right with 'em!

"Why, here, as recently as three years ago, a sickeningly big
percentage of students were blatant pacifists, wanting to knife
their own native land in the dark. But now, when the shameless
fools and the advocates of Communism try to hold pacifist
meetings--why, my friends, in the past five months, since January
first, no less than seventy-six such exhibitionistic orgies have
been raided by their fellow students, and no less than fifty-nine
disloyal Red students have received their just deserts by being
beaten up so severely that never again will they raise in this
free country the bloodstained banner of anarchism! That, my
friends, is NEWS!"

As the General sat down, amid ecstasies of applause, the
village trouble maker, Mrs. Lorinda Pike, leaped up and again
interrupted the love feast:

"Look here, Mr. Edgeways, if you think you can get away with
this sadistic nonsense without--"

She got no farther. Francis Tasbrough, the quarry owner, the
most substantial industrialist in Fort Beulah, stood grandly up,
quieted Lorinda with an outstretched arm, and rumbled in his
Jerusalem-the-Golden basso, "A moment please, my dear lady! All
of us here locally have got used to your political principles.
But as chairman, it is my unfortunate duty to remind you that
General Edgeways and Mrs. Gimmitch have been invited by the club
to address us, whereas you, if you will excuse my saying so, are
not even related to any Rotarian but merely here as the guest of
the Reverend Falck, than whom there is no one whom we more honor.
So, if you will be so good--Ah, I thank you, madame!"

Lorinda Pike had slumped into her chair with her fuse still
burning. Mr. Francis Tasbrough (it rhymed with "low") did not
slump; he sat like the Archbishop of Canterbury on the
archiepiscopal throne.

And Doremus Jessup popped up to soothe them all, being an
intimate of Lorinda, and having, since milkiest boyhood, chummed
with and detested Francis Tasbrough.

This Doremus Jessup, publisher of the Daily Informer,
for all that he was a competent business man and a writer of
editorials not without wit and good New England earthiness, was
yet considered the prime eccentric of Fort Beulah. He was on the
school board, the library board, and he introduced people like
Oswald Garrison Villard, Norman Thomas, and Admiral Byrd when
they came to town lecturing.

Jessup was a littlish man, skinny, smiling, well tanned, with
a small gray mustache, a small and well-trimmed gray beard--in a
community where to sport a beard was to confess one's self a
farmer, a Civil War veteran, or a Seventh Day Adventist.
Doremus's detractors said that he maintained the beard just to be
"highbrow" and "different," to try to appear "artistic." Possibly
they were right. Anyway, he skipped up now and murmured:

"Well, all the birdies in their nest agree. My friend, Mrs.
Pike, ought to know that freedom of speech becomes mere license
when it goes so far as to criticize the Army, differ with the
D.A.R., and advocate the rights of the Mob. So, Lorinda, I think
you ought to apologize to the General, to whom we should be
grateful for explaining to us what the ruling classes of the
country really want. Come on now, my friend--jump up and make
your excuses."

He was looking down on Lorinda with sternness, yet Medary
Cole, president of Rotary, wondered if Doremus wasn't "kidding"
them. He had been known to. Yes--no--he must be wrong, for Mrs.
Lorinda Pike was (without rising) caroling, "Oh yes! I do
apologize, General! Thank you for your revelatory speech!"

The General raised his plump hand (with a Masonic ring as well
as a West Point ring on the sausage-shaped fingers); he bowed
like Galahad or a head-waiter; he shouted with parade-ground
maleness: "Not at all, not at all, madame! We old campaigners
never mind a healthy scrap. Glad when anybody's enough interested
in our fool ideas to go and get sore at us, huh, huh, huh!"

And everybody laughed and sweetness reigned. The program wound
up with Louis Rotenstern's singing of a group of patriotic
ditties: "Marching through Georgia" and "Tenting on the Old
Campground" and "Dixie" and "Old Black Joe" and "I'm Only a Poor
Cowboy and I Know I Done Wrong."

Louis Rotenstern was by all of Fort Beulah classed as a "good
fellow," a caste just below that of "real, old-fashioned
gentleman." Doremus Jessup liked to go fishing with him, and
partridge-hunting; and he considered that no Fifth Avenue tailor
could do anything tastier in the way of a seersucker outfit. But
Louis was a jingo. He explained, and rather often, that it was
not he nor his father who had been born in the ghetto in Prussian
Poland, but his grandfather (whose name, Doremus suspected, had
been something less stylish and Nordic than Rotenstern). Louis's
pocket heroes were Calvin Coolidge, Leonard Wood, Dwight L.
Moody, and Admiral Dewey (and Dewey was a born Vermonter,
rejoiced Louis, who himself had been born in Flatbush, Long
Island).

He was not only 100 per cent American; he exacted 40 per cent
of chauvinistic interest on top of the principal. He was on every
occasion heard to say, "We ought to keep all these foreigners out
of the country, and what I mean, the Kikes just as much as the
Wops and Hunkies and Chinks." Louis was altogether convinced that
if the ignorant politicians would keep their dirty hands off
banking and the stock exchange and hours of labor for salesmen in
department stores, then everyone in the country would profit, as
beneficiaries of increased business, and all of them (including
the retail clerks) be rich as Aga Khan.

So Louis put into his melodies not only his burning voice of a
Bydgoszcz cantor but all his nationalistic fervor, so that every
one joined in the choruses, particularly Mrs. Adelaide Tarr
Gimmitch, with her celebrated train-caller's contralto.

The dinner broke up in cataract-like sounds of happy adieux,
and Doremus Jessup muttered to his goodwife Emma, a solid,
kindly, worried soul, who liked knitting, solitaire, and the
novels of Kathleen Norris: "Was I terrible, butting in that
way?"

"Oh, no, Dormouse, you did just right. I am fond of
Lorinda Pike, but why does she have to show off and parade
all her silly Socialist ideas?"

"You old Tory!" said Doremus. "Don't you want to invite the
Siamese elephant, the Gimmitch, to drop in and have a drink?"

"I do not!" said Emma Jessup.

And in the end, as the Rotarians shuffled and dealt themselves
and their innumerable motorcars, it was Frank Tasbrough who
invited the choicer males, including Doremus, home for an
after-party.

2

As he took his wife home and drove up Pleasant Hill to
Tasbrough's, Doremus Jessup meditated upon the epidemic
patriotism of General Edgeways. But he broke it off to let
himself be absorbed in the hills, as it had been his habit for
the fifty-three years, out of his sixty years of life, that he
had spent in Fort Beulah, Vermont.

Legally a city, Fort Beulah was a comfortable village of old
red brick, old granite workshops, and houses of white clapboards
or gray shingles, with a few smug little modern bungalows, yellow
or seal brown. There was but little manufacturing: a small woolen
mill, a sash-and-door factory, a pump works. The granite which
was its chief produce came from quarries four miles away; in Fort
Beulah itself were only the offices . . . all the money . . . the
meager shacks of most of the quarry workers. It was a town of
perhaps ten thousand souls, inhabiting about twenty thousand
bodies--the proportion of soul-possession may be too high.

There was but one (comparative) skyscraper in town: the
six-story Tasbrough Building, with the offices of the Tasbrough
& Scarlett Granite Quarries; the offices of Doremus's
son-in-law, Fowler Greenhill, M.D., and his partner, old Dr.
Olmsted, of Lawyer Mungo Kitterick, of Harry Kindermann, agent
for maple syrup and dairying supplies, and of thirty or forty
other village samurai.

It was a downy town, a drowsy town, a town of security and
tradition, which still believed in Thanksgiving, Fourth of July,
Memorial Day, and to which May Day was not an occasion for labor
parades but for distributing small baskets of flowers.

It was a May night--late in May of 1936--with a three-quarter
moon. Doremus's house was a mile from the business-center of Fort
Beulah, on Pleasant Hill, which was a spur thrust like a reaching
hand out from the dark rearing mass of Mount Terror. Upland
meadows, moon-glistening, he could see, among the wildernesses of
spruce and maple and poplar on the ridges far above him; and
below, as his car climbed, was Ethan Creek flowing through the
meadows. Deep woods--rearing mountain bulwarks--the air like
spring-water--serene clapboarded houses that remembered the War
of 1812 and the boyhoods of those errant Vermonters, Stephen A.
Douglas, the "Little Giant," and Hiram Powers and Thaddeus
Stevens and Brigham Young and President Chester Alan Arthur.

"No--Powers and Arthur--they were weak sisters," pondered
Doremus. "But Douglas and Thad Stevens and Brigham, the old
stallion--I wonder if we're breeding up any paladins like those
stout, grouchy old devils?--if we're producing 'em anywhere in
New England?--anywhere in America?--anywhere in the world? They
had guts. Independence. Did what they wanted to and thought what
they liked, and everybody could go to hell. The youngsters
today--Oh, the aviators have plenty of nerve. The physicists,
these twenty-five-year-old Ph. D.'s that violate the inviolable
atom, they're pioneers. But most of the wishy-washy young people
today--Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere--not
enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their
music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic
strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and
Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs! Like this smug pup Malcolm
Tasbrough, hanging around Sissy! Aah!

"Wouldn't it be hell if that stuffed shirt, Edgeways, and that
political Mae West, Gimmitch, were right, and we need all these
military monkeyshines and maybe a fool war (to conquer some
sticky-hot country we don't want on a bet!) to put some starch
and git into these marionettes we call our children? Aah!

"But rats--These hills! Castle walls. And this air. They can
keep their Cotswolds and Harz Mountains and Rockies! D.
Jessup--topographical patriot. And I am a--"

"Dormouse, would you mind driving on the right-hand side of
the road--on curves, anyway?" said his wife peaceably.

An upland hollow and mist beneath the moon--a veil of mist
over apple blossoms and the heavy bloom of an ancient lilac bush
beside the ruin of a farmhouse burned these sixty years and
more.

Mr. Francis Tasbrough was the president, general manager, and
chief owner of the Tasbrough & Scarlett Granite Quarries, at
West Beulah, four miles from "the Fort." He was rich, persuasive,
and he had constant labor troubles. He lived in a new Georgian
brick house on Pleasant Hill, a little beyond Doremus Jessup's,
and in that house he maintained a private barroom luxurious as
that of a motor company's advertising manager at Grosse Point. It
was no more the traditional New England than was the Catholic
part of Boston; and Frank himself boasted that, though his family
had for six generations lived in New England, he was no tight
Yankee but in his Efficiency, his Salesmanship, the complete
Pan-American Business Executive.

He was a tall man, Tasbrough, with a yellow mustache and a
monotonously emphatic voice. He was fifty-four, six years younger
than Doremus Jessup, and when he had been four, Doremus had
protected him from the results of his singularly unpopular habit
of hitting the other small boys over the head with things--all
kinds of things--sticks and toy wagons and lunch boxes and dry
cow flops.

Assembled in his private barroom tonight, after the Rotarian
Dinner, were Frank himself, Doremus Jessup, Medary Cole, the
miller, Superintendent of Schools Emil Staubmeyer, R. C.
Crowley--Roscoe Conkling Crowley, the weightiest banker in Fort
Beulah--and, rather surprisingly, Tasbrough's pastor, the
Episcopal minister, the Rev. Mr. Falck, his old hands as delicate
as porcelain, his wilderness of hair silk-soft and white, his
unfleshly face betokening the Good Life. Mr. Falck came from a
solid Knickerbocker family, and he had studied in Edinburgh and
Oxford along with the General Theological Seminary of New York;
and in all of the Beulah Valley there was, aside from Doremus, no
one who more contentedly hid away in the shelter of the
hills.

The barroom had been professionally interior-decorated by a
young New York gentleman with the habit of standing with the back
of his right hand against his hip. It had a stainless-steel bar,
framed illustrations from La Vie Parisienne, silvered
metal tables, and chromium-plated aluminum chairs with scarlet
leather cushions.

All of them except Tasbrough, Medary Cole (a social climber to
whom the favors of Frank Tasbrough were as honey and fresh
ripened figs), and "Professor" Emil Staubmeyer were uncomfortable
in this parrot-cage elegance, but none of them, including Mr.
Falck, seemed to dislike Frank's soda and excellent Scotch or the
sardine sandwiches.

"And I wonder if Thad Stevens would of liked this, either?"
considered Doremus. "He'd of snarled. Old cornered catamount. But
probably not at the whisky!"

"Doremus," demanded Tasbrough, "why don't you take a tumble to
yourself? All these years you've had a lot of fun
criticizing--always being agin the government--kidding
everybody--posing as such a Liberal that you'll stand for all
these subversive elements. Time for you to quit playing tag with
crazy ideas and come in and join the family. These are serious
times--maybe twenty-eight million on relief, and beginning to get
ugly--thinking they've got a vested right now to be
supported.

"And the Jew Communists and Jew financiers plotting together
to control the country. I can understand how, as a younger
fellow, you could pump up a little sympathy for the unions and
even for the Jews--though, as you know, I'll never get over being
sore at you for taking the side of the strikers when those thugs
were trying to ruin my whole business--burn down my polishing and
cutting shops--why, you were even friendly with that alien
murderer Karl Pascal, who started the whole strike--maybe I
didn't enjoy firing him when it was all over!

"But anyway, these labor racketeers are getting together now,
with Communist leaders, and determined to run the country--to
tell men like me how to run our business!--and just like
General Edgeways said, they'll refuse to serve their country if
we should happen to get dragged into some war. Yessir, a mighty
serious hour, and it's time for you to cut the cackle and join
the really responsible citizens."

Said Doremus, "Hm. Yes, I agree it's a serious time. With all
the discontent there is in the country to wash him into office,
Senator Windrip has got an excellent chance to be elected
President, next November, and if he is, probably his gang of
buzzards will get us into some war, just to grease their insane
vanity and show the world that we're the huskiest nation going.
And then I, the Liberal, and you, the Plutocrat, the bogus Tory,
will be led out and shot at 3 A.M. Serious? Huh!"

"Rats! You're exaggerating!" said R. C. Crowley.

Doremus went on: "If Bishop Prang, our Savonarola in a
Cadillac 16, swings his radio audience and his League of
Forgotten Men to Buzz Windrip, Buzz will win. People will think
they're electing him to create more economic security. Then watch
the Terror! God knows there's been enough indication that we
can have tyranny in America--the fix of the Southern
share-croppers, the working conditions of the miners and
garment-makers, and our keeping Mooney in prison so many years.
But wait till Windrip shows us how to say it with machine guns!
Democracy--here and in Britain and France, it hasn't been so
universal a sniveling slavery as Naziism in Germany, such an
imagination-hating, pharisaic materialism as Russia--even if it
has produced industrialists like you, Frank, and bankers like
you, R. C., and given you altogether too much power and money. On
the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy's given the
ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had. That may be
menaced now by Windrip--all the Windrips. All right! Maybe we'll
have to fight paternal dictatorship with a little sound
patricide--fight machine guns with machine guns. Wait till Buzz
takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!"

"The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck
will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country
in the world that can get more hysterical--yes, or more
obsequious!--than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute
monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator
Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang
and Father Coughlin on the radio--divine oracles, to millions.
Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany
grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of
President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or
Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war
hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and
somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty
measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia!
Remember our kissing the--well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the
million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who
swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got
away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? . . . Remember our
Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people
knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the
Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina
mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their
children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the
hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William
Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old
grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole
world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?
. . . Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads
of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here?
Prohibition--shooting down people just because they might
be transporting liquor--no, that couldn't happen in
America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a
people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We're ready to start
on a Children's Crusade--only of adults--right now, and the Right
Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!"

"Well, what if they are?" protested R. C. Crowley. "It might
not be so bad. I don't like all these irresponsible attacks on us
bankers all the time. Of course, Senator Windrip has to pretend
publicly to bawl the banks out, but once he gets into power he'll
give the banks their proper influence in the administration and
take our expert financial advice. Yes. Why are you so afraid of
the word 'Fascism,' Doremus? Just a word--just a word! And might
not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief
nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours--not so worse to
have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini--like Napoleon
or Bismarck in the good old days--and have 'em really run
the country and make it efficient and prosperous again. 'Nother
words, have a doctor who won't take any back-chat, but really
boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or
not!"

"Yes!" said Emil Staubmeyer. "Didn't Hitler save Germany from
the Red Plague of Marxism? I got cousins there. I
know!"

"Hm," said Doremus, as often Doremus did say it. "Cure the
evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics.
I've heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient
malaria, but I've never heard of their curing malaria by giving
the patient syphilis!"

"Think that's nice language to use in the presence of the
Reverend Falck?" raged Tasbrough.

"Besides," said Tasbrough, "this chewing the rag is all
nonsense, anyway. As Crowley says, might be a good thing to have
a strong man in the saddle, but--it just can't happen here in
America."

And it seemed to Doremus that the softly moving lips of the
Reverend Mr. Falck were framing, "The hell it can't!"

3

Doremus jessup, editor and proprietor of the Daily
Informer, the Bible of the conservative Vermont farmers up
and down the Beulah Valley, was born in Fort Beulah in 1876, only
son of an impecunious Universalist pastor, the Reverend Loren
Jessup. His mother was no less than a Bass, of Massachusetts. The
Reverend Loren, a bookish man and fond of flowers, merry but not
noticeably witty, used to chant "Alas, alas, that a Bass of Mass
should marry a minister prone to gas," and he would insist that
she was all wrong ichthyologically--she should have been a cod,
not a bass. There was in the parsonage little meat but plenty of
books, not all theological by any means, so that before he was
twelve Doremus knew the profane writings of Scott, Dickens,
Thackeray, Jane Austen, Tennyson, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Tolstoy,
Balzac. He graduated from Isaiah College--once a bold Unitarian
venture but by 1894 an inter-denominational outfit with nebulous
trinitarian yearnings, a small and rustic stable of learning, in
North Beulah, thirteen miles from "the Fort."

But Isaiah College has come up in the world today--excepting
educationally--for in 1931 it held the Dartmouth football team
down to 64 to 6.

During college, Doremus wrote a great deal of bad poetry and
became an incurable book addict, but he was a fair track athlete.
Naturally, he corresponded for papers in Boston and Springfield,
and after graduation he was a reporter in Rutland and Worcester,
with one glorious year in Boston, whose grimy beauty and shards
of the past were to him what London would be to a young
Yorkshireman. He was excited by concerts, art galleries, and
bookshops; thrice a week he had a twenty-five-cent seat in the
upper balcony of some theater; and for two months he roomed with
a fellow reporter who had actually had a short story in The
Century and who could talk about authors and technique like
the very dickens. But Doremus was not particularly beefy or
enduring, and the noise, the traffic, the bustle of assignments,
exhausted him, and in 1901, three years after his graduation from
college, when his widowed father died and left him $2980.00 and
his library, Doremus went home to Fort Beulah and bought a
quarter interest in the Informer, then a weekly.

By 1936 it was a daily, and he owned all of it . . . with a
perceptible mortgage.

He was an equable and sympathetic boss; an imaginative news
detective; he was, even in this ironbound Republican state,
independent in politics; and in his editorials against graft and
injustice, though they were not fanatically chronic, he could
slash like a dog whip.

He was a third cousin of Calvin Coolidge, who had considered
him sound domestically but loose politically. Doremus considered
himself just the opposite.

He had married his wife, Emma, out of Fort Beulah. She was the
daughter of a wagon manufacturer, a placid, prettyish,
broad-shouldered girl with whom he had gone to high school.

Now, in 1936, of their three children, Philip (Dartmouth, and
Harvard Law School) was married and ambitiously practicing law in
Worcester; Mary was the wife of Fowler Greenhill, M.D., of Fort
Beulah, a gay and hustling medico, a choleric and red-headed
young man, who was a wonder-worker in typhoid, acute
appendicitis, obstetrics, compound fractures, and diets for
anemic children. Fowler and Mary had one son, Doremus's only
grandchild, the bonny David, who at eight was a timid, inventive,
affectionate child with such mourning hound-dog eyes and such
red-gold hair that his picture might well have been hung at a
National Academy show or even been reproduced on the cover of a
Women's Magazine with 2,500,000 circulation. The Greenhills'
neighbors inevitably said of the boy, "My, Davy's got such an
imagination, hasn't he! I guess he'll be a Writer, just like his
Grampa!"

Third of Doremus's children was the gay, the pert, the dancing
Cecilia, known as "Sissy," aged eighteen, where her brother
Philip was thirty-two and Mary, Mrs. Greenhill, turned thirty.
She rejoiced the heart of Doremus by consenting to stay home
while she was finishing high school, though she talked vigorously
of going off to study architecture and "simply make
millions, my dear," by planning and erecting miraculous
small homes.

Mrs. Jessup was lavishly (and quite erroneously) certain that
her Philip was the spit and image of the Prince of Wales;
Philip's wife, Merilla (the fair daughter of Worcester,
Massachusetts), curiously like the Princess Marina; that Mary
would by any stranger be taken for Katharine Hepburn; that Sissy
was a dryad and David a medieval page; and that Doremus (though
she knew him better than she did those changelings, her children)
amazingly resembled that naval hero, Winfield Scott Schley, as he
looked in 1898.

She was a loyal woman, Emma Jessup, warmly generous, a cordon
bleu at making lemon-meringue pie, a parochial Tory, an orthodox
Episcopalian, and completely innocent of any humor. Doremus was
perpetually tickled by her kind solemnity, and it was to be
chalked down to him as a singular act of grace that he refrained
from pretending that he had become a working Communist and was
thinking of leaving for Moscow immediately.

Doremus looked depressed, looked old, when he lifted himself,
as from an invalid's chair, out of the Chrysler, in his hideous
garage of cement and galvanized iron. (But it was a proud two-car
garage; besides the four-year-old Chrysler, they had a new Ford
convertible coupe, which Doremus hoped to drive some day when
Sissy wasn't using it.)

He cursed competently as, on the cement walk from the garage
to the kitchen, he barked his shins on the lawn-mower, left there
by his hired man, one Oscar Ledue, known always as "Shad," a
large and red-faced, a sulky and surly Irish-Canuck peasant. Shad
always did things like leaving lawnmowers about to snap at the
shins of decent people. He was entirely incompetent and vicious.
He never edged-up the flower beds, he kept his stinking old cap
on his head when he brought in logs for the fireplace, he did not
scythe the dandelions in the meadow till they had gone to seed,
he delighted in failing to tell cook that the peas were now ripe,
and he was given to shooting cats, stray dogs, chipmunks, and
honey-voiced blackbirds. At least twice a day, Doremus resolved
to fire him, but--Perhaps he was telling himself the truth when
he insisted that it was amusing to try to civilize this prize
bull.

Doremus trotted into the kitchen, decided that he did not want
some cold chicken and a glass of milk from the ice-box, nor even
a wedge of the celebrated cocoanut layer cake made by their
cook-general, Mrs. Candy, and mounted to his "study," on the
third, the attic floor.

His house was an ample, white, clapboarded structure of the
vintage of 1880, a square bulk with a mansard roof and, in front,
a long porch with insignificant square white pillars. Doremus
declared that the house was ugly, "but ugly in a nice way."

His study, up there, was his one perfect refuge from
annoyances and bustle. It was the only room in the house that
Mrs. Candy (quiet, grimly competent, thoroughly literate, once a
Vermont country schoolteacher) was never allowed to clean. It was
an endearing mess of novels, copies of the Congressional
Record, of the New Yorker, Time, Nation, New Republic, New
Masses, and Speculum (cloistral organ of the Medieval
Society), treatises on taxation and monetary systems, road maps,
volumes on exploration in Abyssinia and the Antarctic, chewed
stubs of pencils, a shaky portable typewriter, fishing tackle,
rumpled carbon paper, two comfortable old leather chairs, a
Windsor chair at his desk, the complete works of Thomas
Jefferson, his chief hero, a microscope and a collection of
Vermont butterflies, Indian arrowheads, exiguous volumes of
Vermont village poetry printed in local newspaper offices, the
Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, Science and Health,
Selections from the Mahabharata, the poetry of Sandburg, Frost,
Masters, Jeffers, Ogden Nash, Edgar Guest, Omar Khayyam, and
Milton, a shotgun and a .22 repeating rifle, an Isaiah College
banner, faded, the complete Oxford Dictionary, five fountain pens
of which two would work, a vase from Crete dating from 327
B.C.--very ugly--the World Almanac for year before last, with the
cover suggesting that it had been chewed by a dog, odd pairs of
horn-rimmed spectacles and of rimless eyeglasses, none of which
now suited his eyes, a fine, reputedly Tudor oak cabinet from
Devonshire, portraits of Ethan Allen and Thaddeus Stevens, rubber
wading-boots, senile red morocco slippers, a poster issued by the
Vermont Mercury at Woodstock, on September 2, 1840,
announcing a glorious Whig victory, twenty-four boxes of safety
matches one by one stolen from the kitchen, assorted yellow
scratch pads, seven books on Russia and
Bolshevism--extraordinarily pro or extraordinarily con--a signed
photograph of Theodore Roosevelt, six cigarette cartons, all half
empty (according to the tradition of journalistic eccentrics,
Doremus should have smoked a Good Old Pipe, but he detested the
slimy ooze of nicotine-soaked spittle), a rag carpet on the
floor, a withered sprig of holly with a silver Christmas ribbon,
a case of seven unused genuine Sheffield razors, dictionaries in
French, German, Italian and Spanish--the first of which languages
he really could read--a canary in a Bavarian gilded wicker cage,
a worn linen-bound copy of Old Hearthside Songs for Home and
Picnic whose selections he was wont to croon, holding the
book on his knee, and an old cast-iron Franklin stove.
Everything, indeed, that was proper for a hermit and improper for
impious domestic hands.

Before switching on the light he squinted through a dormer
window at the bulk of mountains cutting the welter of stars. In
the center were the last lights of Fort Beulah, far below, and on
the left, unseen, the soft meadows, the old farmhouses, the great
dairy barns of the Ethan Mowing. It was a kind country, cool and
clear as a shaft of light and, he meditated, he loved it more
every quiet year of his freedom from city towers and city
clamor.

One of the few times when Mrs. Candy, their housekeeper, was
permitted to enter his hermit's cell was to leave there, on the
long table, his mail. He picked it up and started to read
briskly, standing by the table. (Time to go to bed! Too much
chatter and bellyaching, this evening! Good Lord! Past midnight!)
He sighed then, and sat in his Windsor chair, leaning his elbows
on the table and studiously reading the first letter over
again.

It was from Victor Loveland, one of the younger, more
international-minded teachers in Doremus's old school, Isaiah
College.

DEAR DR. JESSUP:

("Hm. 'Dr. Jessup.' Not me, m' lad. The only honorary degree
I'll ever get'll be Master in Veterinary Surgery or Laureate in
Embalming.")

A very dangerous situation has arisen here at Isaiah and
those of us who are trying to advocate something like integrity
and modernity are seriously worried--not, probably, that we need
to be long, as we shall probably all get fired. Where two years
ago most of our students just laughed at any idea of military
drilling, they have gone warlike in a big way, with undergrads
drilling with rifles, machine guns, and cute little blueprints of
tanks and planes all over the place. Two of them, voluntarily,
are going down to Rutland every week to take training in flying,
avowedly to get ready for wartime aviation. When I cautiously ask
them what the dickens war they are preparing for they just
scratch and indicate they don't care much, so long as they can
get a chance to show what virile proud gents they are.

Well, we've got used to that. But just this afternoon--the
newspapers haven't got this yet--the Board of Trustees, including
Mr. Francis Tasbrough and our president, Dr. Owen Peaseley, met
and voted a resolution that--now listen to this, will you, Dr.
Jessup--"Any member of the faculty or student body of Isaiah who
shall in any way, publicly or privately, in print, writing, or by
the spoken word, adversely criticize military training at or by
Isaiah College, or in any other institution of learning in the
United States, or by the state militias, federal forces, or other
officially recognized military organizations in this country,
shall be liable to immediate dismissal from this college, and any
student who shall, with full and proper proof, bring to the
attention of the President or any Trustee of the college such
malign criticism by any person whatever connected in any way with
the institution shall receive extra credits in his course in
military training, such credits to apply to the number of credits
necessary for graduation."

What can we do with such fast exploding Fascism?

VICTOR LOVELAND.

And Loveland, teacher of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit (two lone
students) had never till now meddled in any politics of more
recent date than A.D. 180.

"So Frank was there at Trustees' meeting, and didn't dare tell
me," Doremus sighed. "Encouraging them to become spies. Gestapo.
Oh, my dear Frank, this a serious time! You, my good bonehead,
for once you said it! President Owen J. Peaseley, the
bagged-faced, pious, racketeering, damned hedge-schoolmaster! But
what can I do? Oh--write another editorial viewing-with-alarm, I
suppose!"

He plumped into a deep chair and sat fidgeting, like a
bright-eyed, apprehensive little bird.

On the door was a tearing sound, imperious, demanding.

He opened to admit Foolish, the family dog. Foolish was a
reliable combination of English setter, Airedale, cocker spaniel,
wistful doe, and rearing hyena. He gave one abrupt snort of
welcome and nuzzled his brown satin head against Doremus's knee.
His bark awakened the canary, under the absurd old blue sweater
that covered its cage, and it automatically caroled that it was
noon, summer noon, among the pear trees in the green Harz hills,
none of which was true. But the bird's trilling, the dependable
presence of Foolish, comforted Doremus, made military drill and
belching politicians seem unimportant, and in security he dropped
asleep in the worn brown leather chair.

4

All this June week, Doremus was waiting for 2 P.M. on
Saturday, the divinely appointed hour of the weekly prophetic
broadcast by Bishop Paul Peter Prang.

Now, six weeks before the 1936 national conventions, it was
probable that neither Franklin Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Senator
Vandenberg, Ogden Mills, General Hugh Johnson, Colonel Frank
Knox, nor Senator Borah would be nominated for President by
either party, and that the Republican standard-bearer--meaning
the one man who never has to lug a large, bothersome, and
somewhat ridiculous standard--would be that loyal yet strangely
honest old-line Senator, Walt Trowbridge, a man with a touch of
Lincoln in him, dashes of Will Rogers and George W. Norris, a
suspected trace of Jim Farley, but all the rest plain, bulky,
placidly defiant Walt Trowbridge.

Few men doubted that the Democratic candidate would be that
sky-rocket, Senator Berzelius Windrip--that is to say, Windrip as
the mask and bellowing voice, with his satanic secretary, Lee
Sarason, as the brain behind.

Senator Windrip's father was a small-town Western druggist,
equally ambitious and unsuccessful, and had named him Berzelius
after the Swedish chemist. Usually he was known as "Buzz." He had
worked his way through a Southern Baptist college, of
approximately the same academic standing as a Jersey City
business college, and through a Chicago law school, and settled
down to practice in his native state and to enliven local
politics. He was a tireless traveler, a boisterous and humorous
speaker, an inspired guesser at what political doctrines the
people would like, a warm handshaker, and willing to lend money.
He drank Coca-Cola with the Methodists, beer with the Lutherans,
California white wine with the Jewish village merchants--and,
when they were safe from observation, white-mule corn whisky with
all of them.

Within twenty years he was as absolute a ruler of his state as
ever a sultan was of Turkey.

He was never governor; he had shrewdly seen that his
reputation for research among planters-punch recipes, varieties
of poker, and the psychology of girl stenographers might cause
his defeat by the church people, so he had contented himself with
coaxing to the gubernatorial shearing a trained baa-lamb of a
country schoolmaster whom he had gayly led on a wide blue ribbon.
The state was certain that he had "given it a good
administration," and they knew that it was Buzz Windrip who was
responsible, not the Governor.

Windrip caused the building of impressive highroads and of
consolidated country schools; he made the state buy tractors and
combines and lend them to the farmers at cost. He was certain
that some day America would have vast business dealings with the
Russians and, though he detested all Slavs, he made the State
University put in the first course in the Russian language that
had been known in all that part of the West. His most original
invention was quadrupling the state militia and rewarding the
best soldiers in it with training in agriculture, aviation, and
radio and automobile engineering.

The militiamen considered him their general and their god, and
when the state attorney general announced that he was going to
have Windrip indicted for having grafted $200,000 of tax money,
the militia rose to Buzz Windrip's orders as though they were his
private army and, occupying the legislative chambers and all the
state offices, and covering the streets leading to the Capitol
with machine guns, they herded Buzz's enemies out of town.

He took the United States Senatorship as though it were his
manorial right, and for six years, his only rival as the most
bouncing and feverish man in the Senate had been the late Huey
Long of Louisiana.

He preached the comforting gospel of so redistributing wealth
that every person in the country would have several thousand
dollars a year (monthly Buzz changed his prediction as to how
many thousand), while all the rich men were nevertheless to be
allowed enough to get along, on a maximum of $500,000 a year. So
everybody was happy in the prospect of Windrip's becoming
president.

The Reverend Dr. Egerton Schlemil, dean of St. Agnes
Cathedral, San Antonio, Texas, stated (once in a sermon, once in
the slightly variant mimeographed press handout on the sermon,
and seven times in interviews) that Buzz's coming into power
would be "like the Heaven-blest fall of revivifying rain upon a
parched and thirsty land." Dr. Schlemil did not say anything
about what happened when the blest rain came and kept falling
steadily for four years.

No one, even among the Washington correspondents, seemed to
know precisely how much of a part in Senator Windrip's career was
taken by his secretary, Lee Sarason. When Windrip had first
seized power in his state, Sarason had been managing editor of
the most widely circulated paper in all that part of the country.
Sarason's genesis was and remained a mystery.

It was said that he had been born in Georgia, in Minnesota, on
the East Side of New York, in Syria; that he was pure Yankee,
Jewish, Charleston Huguenot. It was known that he had been a
singularly reckless lieutenant of machine-gunners as a youngster
during the Great War, and that he had stayed over, ambling about
Europe, for three or four years; that he had worked on the Paris
edition of the New York Herald; nibbled at painting and at
Black Magic in Florence and Munich; had a few sociological months
at the London School of Economics; associated with decidedly
curious people in arty Berlin night restaurants. Returned home,
Sarason had become decidedly the "hard-boiled reporter" of the
shirt-sleeved tradition, who asserted that he would rather be
called a prostitute than anything so sissified as "journalist."
But it was suspected that nevertheless he still retained the
ability to read.

He had been variously a Socialist and an anarchist. Even in
1936 there were rich people who asserted that Sarason was "too
radical," but actually he had lost his trust (if any) in the
masses during the hoggish nationalism after the war; and he
believed now only in resolute control by a small oligarchy. In
this he was a Hitler, a Mussolini.

Sarason was lanky and drooping, with thin flaxen hair, and
thick lips in a bony face. His eyes were sparks at the bottoms of
two dark wells. In his long hands there was bloodless strength.
He used to surprise persons who were about to shake hands with
him by suddenly bending their fingers back till they almost
broke. Most people didn't much like it. As a newspaperman he was
an expert of the highest grade. He could smell out a
husband-murder, the grafting of a politician--that is to say, of
a politician belonging to a gang opposed by his paper--the
torture of animals or children, and this last sort of story he
liked to write himself, rather than hand it to a reporter, and
when he did write it, you saw the moldy cellar, heard the whip,
felt the slimy blood.

Compared with Lee Sarason as a newspaperman, little Doremus
Jessup of Fort Beulah was like a village parson compared with the
twenty-thousand-dollar minister of a twenty-story New York
institutional tabernacle with radio affiliations.

Senator Windrip had made Sarason, officially, his secretary,
but he was known to be much more--bodyguard, ghost-writer,
press-agent, economic adviser; and in Washington, Lee Sarason
became the man most consulted and least liked by newspaper
correspondents in the whole Senate Office Building.

Windrip was a young forty-eight in 1936; Sarason an aged and
sagging-cheeked forty-one.

Though he probably based it on notes dictated by
Windrip--himself no fool in the matter of fictional
imagination--Sarason had certainly done the actual writing of
Windrip's lone book, the Bible of his followers, part biography,
part economic program, and part plain exhibitionistic boasting,
called Zero Hour--Over the Top.

It was a salty book and contained more suggestions for
remolding the world than the three volumes of Karl Marx and all
the novels of H. G. Wells put together.

Perhaps the most familiar, most quoted paragraph of Zero
Hour, beloved by the provincial press because of its simple
earthiness (as written by an initiate in Rosicrucian lore, named
Sarason) was:

"When I was a little shaver back in the corn fields, we kids
used to just wear one-strap suspenders on our pants, and we
called them the Galluses on our Britches, but they held them up
and saved our modesty just as much as if we had put on a
high-toned Limey accent and talked about Braces and Trousers.
That's how the whole world of what they call 'scientific
economics' is like. The Marxians think that by writing of
Galluses as Braces, they've got something that knocks the
stuffings out of the old-fashioned ideas of Washington and
Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Well and all, I sure believe in
using every new economic discovery, like they have been worked
out in the so-called Fascist countries, like Italy and Germany
and Hungary and Poland--yes, by thunder, and even in Japan--we
probably will have to lick those Little Yellow Men some day, to
keep them from pinching our vested and rightful interests in
China, but don't let that keep us from grabbing off any smart
ideas that those cute little beggars have worked out!

"I want to stand up on my hind legs and not just admit but
frankly holler right out that we've got to change our system a
lot, maybe even change the whole Constitution (but change it
legally, and not by violence) to bring it up from the
horseback-and-corduroy-road epoch to the
automobile-and-cement-highway period of today. The Executive has
got to have a freer hand and be able to move quick in an
emergency, and not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer
congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates.
BUT--and it's a But as big as Deacon Checkerboard's hay-barn back
home--these new economic changes are only a means to an End, and
that End is and must be, fundamentally, the same principles of
Liberty, Equality, and Justice that were advocated by the
Founding Fathers of this great land back in 1776!"

The most confusing thing about the whole campaign of 1936 was
the relationship of the two leading parties. Old-Guard
Republicans complained that their proud party was begging for
office, hat in hand; veteran Democrats that their traditional
Covered Wagons were jammed with college professors, city
slickers, and yachtsmen.

The rival to Senator Windrip in public reverence was a
political titan who seemed to have no itch for office--the
Reverend Paul Peter Prang, of Persepolis, Indiana, Bishop of the
Methodist Episcopal Church, a man perhaps ten years older than
Windrip. His weekly radio address, at 2 P.M. every Saturday, was
to millions the very oracle of God. So supernatural was this
voice from the air that for it men delayed their golf, and women
even postponed their Saturday afternoon contract bridge.

It was Father Charles Coughlin, of Detroit, who had first
thought out the device of freeing himself from any censorship of
his political sermons on the Mount by "buying his own time on the
air"--it being only in the twentieth century that mankind has
been able to buy Time as it buys soap and gasoline. This
invention was almost equal, in its effect on all American life
and thought, to Henry Ford's early conception of selling cars
cheap to millions of people, instead of selling a few as
luxuries.

But to the pioneer Father Coughlin, Bishop Paul Peter Prang
was as the Ford V-8 to the Model A.

Prang was more sentimental than Coughlin; he shouted more; he
agonized more; he reviled more enemies by name, and rather
scandalously; he told more funny stories, and ever so many more
tragic stories about the repentant deathbeds of bankers,
atheists, and Communists. His voice was more nasally native, and
he was pure Middle West, with a New England Protestant
Scotch-English ancestry, where Coughlin was always a little
suspect, in the Sears-Roebuck regions, as a Roman Catholic with
an agreeable Irish accent.

No man in history has ever had such an audience as Bishop
Prang, nor so much apparent power. When he demanded that his
auditors telegraph their congressmen to vote on a bill as he,
Prang, ex cathedra and alone, without any college of
cardinals, had been inspired to believe they ought to vote, then
fifty thousand people would telephone, or drive through back-hill
mud, to the nearest telegraph office and in His name give their
commands to the government. Thus, by the magic of electricity,
Prang made the position of any king in history look a little
absurd and tinseled.

To millions of League members he sent mimeographed letters
with facsimile signature, and with the salutation so craftily
typed in that they rejoiced in a personal greeting from the
Founder.

Doremus Jessup, up in the provincial hills, could never quite
figure out just what political gospel it was that Bishop Prang
thundered from his Sinai which, with its microphone and typed
revelations timed to the split-second, was so much more snappy
and efficient than the original Sinai. In detail, he preached
nationalization of the banks, mines, waterpower, and
transportation; limitation of incomes; increased wages,
strengthening of the labor unions, more fluid distribution of
consumer goods. But everybody was nibbling at those noble
doctrines now, from Virginia Senators to Minnesota
Farmer-Laborites, with no one being so credulous as to expect any
of them to be carried out.

There was a theory around some place that Prang was only the
humble voice of his vast organization, "The League of Forgotten
Men." It was universally believed to have (though no firm of
chartered accountants had yet examined its rolls) twenty-seven
million members, along with proper assortments of national
officers and state officers, and town officers and hordes of
committees with stately names like "National Committee on the
Compilation of Statistics on Unemployment and Normal
Employability in the Soy-Bean Industry." Hither and yon, Bishop
Prang, not as the still small voice of God but in lofty person,
addressed audiences of twenty thousand persons at a time, in the
larger cities all over the country, speaking in huge halls meant
for prize-fighting, in cinema palaces, in armories, in baseball
parks, in circus tents, while after the meetings his brisk
assistants accepted membership applications and dues for the
League of Forgotten Men. When his timid detractors hinted that
this was all very romantic, very jolly and picturesque, but not
particularly dignified, and Bishop Prang answered, "My Master
delighted to speak in whatever vulgar assembly would listen to
Him," no one dared answer him, "But you aren't your Master--not
yet."

With all the flourish of the League and its mass meetings,
there had never been a pretense that any tenet of the League, any
pressure on Congress and the President to pass any particular
bill, originated with anybody save Prang himself, with no
collaboration from the committees or officers of the League. All
that the Prang who so often crooned about the Humility and
Modesty of the Saviour wanted was for one hundred and thirty
million people to obey him, their Priest-King, implicitly in
everything concerning their private morals, their public
asseverations, how they might earn their livings, and what
relationships they might have to other wage-earners.

"And that," Doremus Jessup grumbled, relishing the shocked
piety of his wife Emma, "makes Brother Prang a worse tyrant than
Caligula--a worse Fascist than Napoleon. Mind you, I don't
really believe all these rumors about Prang's grafting on
membership dues and the sale of pamphlets and donations to pay
for the radio. It's much worse than that. I'm afraid he's an
honest fanatic! That's why he's such a real Fascist menace--he's
so confoundedly humanitarian, in fact so Noble, that a majority
of people are willing to let him boss everything, and with a
country this size, that's quite a job--quite a job, my
beloved--even for a Methodist Bishop who gets enough gifts so
that he can actually 'buy Time'!"

All the while, Walt Trowbridge, possible Republican candidate
for President, suffering from the deficiency of being honest and
disinclined to promise that he could work miracles, was insisting
that we live in the United States of America and not on a golden
highway to Utopia.

There was nothing exhilarating in such realism, so all this
rainy week in June, with the apple blossoms and the lilacs
fading, Doremus Jessup was awaiting the next encyclical of Pope
Paul Peter Prang.

5

I know the Press only too well. Almost all editors hide away
in spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest
or the humble delights of jaunts out-of-doors, plotting how they
can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill
their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have given
their all for the common good and who are vulnerable because they
stand out in the fierce Light that beats around the Throne.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

The June morning shone, the last petals of the wild-cherry
blossoms lay dew-covered on the grass, robins were about their
brisk business on the lawn. Doremus, by nature a late-lier and
pilferer of naps after he had been called at eight, was stirred
to spring up and stretch his arms out fully five or six times in
Swedish exercises, in front of his window, looking out across the
Beulah River Valley to dark masses of pine on the mountain slopes
three miles away.

Doremus and Emma had had each their own bedroom, these fifteen
years, not altogether to her pleasure. He asserted that he
couldn't share a bedroom with any person living, because he was a
night-mutterer, and liked to make a really good, uprearing,
pillow-slapping job of turning over in bed without feeling that
he was disturbing someone.

It was Saturday, the day of the Prang revelation, but on this
crystal morning, after days of rain, he did not think of Prang at
all, but of the fact that Philip, his son, with wife, had popped
up from Worcester for the week-end, and that the whole crew of
them, along with Lorinda Pike and Buck Titus, were going to have
a "real, old-fashioned, family picnic."

They had all demanded it, even the fashionable Sissy, a woman
who, at eighteen, had much concern with tennis-teas, golf, and
mysterious, appallingly rapid motor trips with Malcolm Tasbrough
(just graduating from high school), or with the Episcopal
parson's grandson, Julian Falck (freshman in Amherst). Doremus
had scolded that he couldn't go to any blame picnic; it
was his job, as editor, to stay home and listen to Bishop
Prang's broadcast at two; but they had laughed at him and rumpled
his hair and miscalled him until he had promised. . . . They
didn't know it, but he had slyly borrowed a portable radio from
his friend, the local R. C. priest, Father Stephen Perefixe, and
he was going to hear Prang whether or no.

He was glad they were going to have Lorinda Pike--he was fond
of that sardonic saint--and Buck Titus, who was perhaps his
closest intimate.

James Buck Titus, who was fifty but looked thirty-eight,
straight, broad-shouldered, slim-waisted, long-mustached,
swarthy--Buck was the Dan'l Boone type of Old American, or,
perhaps, an Indian-fighting cavalry captain, out of Charles King.
He had graduated from Williams, with ten weeks in England and ten
years in Montana, divided between cattle-raising, prospecting,
and a horse-breeding ranch. His father, a richish railroad
contractor, had left him the great farm near West Beulah, and
Buck had come back home to grow apples, to breed Morgan
stallions, and to read Voltaire, Anatole France, Nietzsche, and
Dostoyefsky. He served in the war, as a private; detested his
officers, refused a commission, and liked the Germans at Cologne.
He was a useful polo player, but regarded riding to the hounds as
childish. In politics, he did not so much yearn over the wrongs
of Labor as feel scornful of the tight-fisted exploiters who
denned in office and stinking factory. He was as near to the
English country squire as one may find in America. He was a
bachelor, with a big mid-Victorian house, well kept by a friendly
Negro couple; a tidy place in which he sometimes entertained
ladies who were not quite so tidy. He called himself an
"agnostic" instead of an "atheist" only because he detested the
street-bawling, tract-peddling evangelicism of the professional
atheists. He was cynical, he rarely smiled, and he was
unwaveringly loyal to all the Jessups. His coming to the picnic
made Doremus as blithe as his grandson David.

"Perhaps, even under Fascism, the 'Church clock will stand at
ten to three, and there will be honey still for tea,'" Doremus
hoped, as he put on his rather dandified country tweeds.

The only stain on the preparations for the picnic was the
grouchiness of the hired man, Shad Ledue. When he was asked to
turn the ice-cream freezer he growled, "Why the heck don't you
folks get an electric freezer? He grumbled, most audibly, at the
weight of the picnic baskets, and when he was asked to clean up
the basement during their absence, he retorted only with a glare
of silent fury.

"You ought to get rid of that fellow, Ledue," urged Doremus's
son Philip, the lawyer.

"Oh, I don't know," considered Doremus. "Probably just
shiftlessness on my part. But I tell myself I'm doing a social
experiment--trying to train him to be as gracious as the average
Neanderthal man. Or perhaps I'm scared of him--he's the kind of
vindictive peasant that sets fire to barns. . . . Did you know
that he actually reads, Phil?"

"No!"

"Yep. Mostly movie magazines, with nekked ladies and Wild
Western stories, but he also reads the papers. Told me he greatly
admired Buzz Windrip; says Windrip will certainly be President,
and then everybody--by which, I'm afraid, Shad means only
himself--will have five thousand a year. Buzz certainly has a
bunch of philanthropists for followers."

"Now listen, Dad. You don't understand Senator Windrip. Oh,
he's something of a demagogue--he shoots off his mouth a lot
about how he'll jack up the income tax and grab the banks, but he
won't--that's just molasses for the cockroaches. What he will do,
and maybe only he can do it, is to protect us from the
murdering, thieving, lying Bolsheviks that would--why, they'd
like to stick all of us that are going on this picnic, all the
decent clean people that are accustomed to privacy, into hall
bedrooms, and make us cook our cabbage soup on a Primus stuck on
a bed! Yes, or maybe 'liquidate' us entirely! No sir, Berzelius
Windrip is the fellow to balk the dirty sneaking Jew spies that
pose as American Liberals!"

"The face is the face of my reasonably competent son, Philip,
but the voice is the voice of the Jew-baiter, Julius Streicher,"
sighed Doremus.

The picnic ground was among a Stonehenge of gray and
lichen-painted rocks, fronting a birch grove high up on Mount
Terror, on the upland farm of Doremus's cousin, Henry Veeder, a
solid, reticent Vermonter of the old days. They looked through a
distant mountain gap to the faint mercury of Lake Champlain and,
across it, the bulwark of the Adirondacks.

Davy Greenhill and his hero, Buck Titus, wrestled in the hardy
pasture grass. Philip and Dr. Fowler Greenhill, Doremus's
son-in-law (Phil plump and half bald at thirty-two; Fowler
belligerently red-headed and red-mustached) argued about the
merits of the autogiro. Doremus lay with his head against a rock,
his cap over his eyes, gazing down into the paradise of Beulah
Valley--he could not have sworn to it, but he rather thought he
saw an angel floating in the radiant upper air above the valley.
The women, Emma and Mary Greenhill, Sissy and Philip's wife and
Lorinda Pike, were setting out the picnic lunch--a pot of beans
with crisp salt pork, fried chicken, potatoes warmed-over with
croutons, tea biscuits, crab-apple jelly, salad, raisin pie--on a
red-and-white tablecloth spread on a flat rock.

But for the parked motorcars, the scene might have been New
England in 1885, and you could see the women in chip hats and
tight-bodiced, high-necked frocks with bustles; the men in straw
boaters with dangling ribbons and adorned with
side-whiskers--Doremus's beard not clipped, but flowing like a
bridal veil. When Dr. Greenhill fetched down Cousin Henry Veeder,
a bulky yet shy enough pre-Ford farmer in clean, faded overalls,
then was Time again unbought, secure, serene.

And the conversation had a comfortable triviality, an
affectionate Victorian dullness. However Doremus might fret about
"conditions," however skittishly Sissy might long for the
presence of her beaux, Julian Falck and Malcolm Tasbrough, there
was nothing modern and neurotic, nothing savoring of Freud,
Adler, Marx, Bertrand Russell, or any other divinity of the
1930's, when Mother Emma chattered to Mary and Merilla about her
rose bushes that had "winter-killed," and the new young maples
that the field mice had gnawed, and the difficulty of getting
Shad Ledue to bring in enough fireplace wood, and how Shad gorged
pork chops and fried potatoes and pie at lunch, which he ate at
the Jessups'.

And the View. The women talked about the View as honeymooners
once talked at Niagara Falls.

David and Buck Titus were playing ship, now, on a rearing
rock--it was the bridge, and David was Captain Popeye, with Buck
his bosun; and even Dr. Greenhill, that impetuous crusader who
was constantly infuriating the county board of health by
reporting the slovenly state of the poor farm and the stench in
the county jail, was lazy in the sun and with the greatest of
concentration kept an unfortunate little ant running back and
forth on a twig. His wife Mary--the golfer, the runner-up in
state tennis tournaments, the giver of smart but not too bibulous
cocktail parties at the country club, the wearer of smart brown
tweeds with a green scarf--seemed to have dropped gracefully back
into the domesticity of her mother, and to consider as a very
weighty thing a recipe for celery-and-roquefort sandwiches on
toasted soda crackers. She was the handsome Older Jessup Girl
again, back in the white house with the mansard roof.

And Foolish, lying on his back with his four paws idiotically
flopping, was the most pastorally old-fashioned of them all.

The only serious flare of conversation was when Buck Titus
snarled to Doremus: "Certainly a lot of Messiahs pottin' at you
from the bushes these days--Buzz Windrip and Bishop Prang and
Father Coughlin and Dr. Townsend (though he seems to have gone
back to Nazareth) and Upton Sinclair and Rev. Frank Buchman and
Bernarr Macfadden and Willum Randolph Hearst and Governor
Talmadge and Floyd Olson and--Say, I swear the best Messiah in
the whole show is this darky, Father Divine. He doesn't just
promise he's going to feed the Under-privileged ten years from
now--he hands out the fried drumsticks and gizzard right along
with the Salvation. How about him for President?"

Out of nowhere appeared Julian Falck.

This young man, freshman in Amherst the past year, grandson of
the Episcopal rector and living with the old man because his
parents were dead, was in the eyes of Doremus the most nearly
tolerable of Sissy's suitors. He was Swede-blond and wiry, with a
neat, small face and canny eyes. He called Doremus "sir," and he
had, unlike most of the radio-and-motor-hypnotized
eighteen-year-olds in the Fort, read a book, and
voluntarily--read Thomas Wolfe and William Rollins, John Strachey
and Stuart Chase and Ortega. Whether Sissy preferred him to
Malcolm Tasbrough, her father did not know. Malcolm was taller
and thicker than Julian, and he drove his own streamline De Soto,
while Julian could only borrow his grandfather's shocking old
flivver.

Sissy and Julian bickered amiably about Alice Aylot's skill in
backgammon, and Foolish scratched himself in the sun.

But Doremus was not being pastoral. He was being anxious and
scientific. While the others jeered, "When does Dad take his
audition?" and "What's he learning to be--a crooner or a
hockey-announcer?" Doremus was adjusting the doubtful portable
radio. Once he thought he was going to be with them in the Home
Sweet Home atmosphere, for he tuned in on a program of old songs,
and all of them, including Cousin Henry Veeder, who had a hidden
passion for fiddlers and barn dances and parlor organs, hummed
"Gaily the Troubadour" and "Maid of Athens" and "Darling Nelly
Gray." But when the announcer informed them that these ditties
were being sponsored by Toily Oily, the Natural Home Cathartic,
and that they were being rendered by a sextette of young males
horribly called "The Smoothies," Doremus abruptly shut them
off.

"Why, what's the matter, Dad?" cried Sissy.

"'Smoothies'! God! This country deserves what it's going to
get!" snapped Doremus. "Maybe we need a Buzz Windrip!"

The moment, then--it should have been announced by cathedral
chimes--of the weekly address of Bishop Paul Peter Prang.

Coming from an airless closet, smelling of sacerdotal woolen
union suits, in Persepolis, Indiana, it leapt to the farthest
stars; it circled the world at 186,000 miles a second--a million
miles while you stopped to scratch. It crashed into the cabin of
a whaler on a dark polar sea; into an office, paneled with
linen-fold oak looted from a Nottinghamshire castle, on the
sixty-seventh story of a building on Wall Street; into the
foreign office in Tokio; into the rocky hollow below the shining
birches upon Mount Terror, in Vermont.

Bishop Prang spoke, as he usually did, with a grave
kindliness, a virile resonance, which made his self, magically
coming to them on the unseen aerial pathway, at once dominating
and touched with charm; and whatever his purposes might be, his
words were on the side of the Angels:

"My friends of the radio audience, I shall have but six more
weekly petitions to make you before the national conventions,
which will decide the fate of this distraught nation, and the
time has come now to act--to act! Enough of words! Let me put
together certain separated phrases out of the sixth chapter of
Jeremiah, which seem to have been prophetically written for this
hour of desperate crisis in America:

"'Oh ye children of Benjamin, gather yourselves together to
flee out of the midst of Jerusalem. . . . Prepare ye war . . .
arise and let us go up at noon. Woe unto us! for the day goeth
away, for the shadows of the evening are stretched out. Arise,
and let us go by night and let us destroy her palaces. . . . I am
full of the fury of the Lord; I am weary with holding it in; I
will pour it out upon the children abroad, and upon the assembly
of young men together; for even the husband with the wife shall
be taken, the aged with him that is full of days. . . . I will
stretch out my hand upon the inhabitants of this land, saith the
Lord. For from the least of them even unto the greatest, every
one is given to covetousness; and from the prophet even unto the
priest, every one dealeth falsely . . . saying Peace, Peace, when
there is no Peace!'

"So spake the Book, of old. . . . But it was spoken also to
America, of 1936!

"There is no Peace! For more than a year now, the League of
Forgotten Men has warned the politicians, the whole government,
that we are sick unto death of being the Dispossessed--and that,
at last, we are more than fifty million strong; no whimpering
horde, but with the will, the voices, the votes to enforce
our sovereignty! We have in no uncertain way informed every
politician that we demand--that we demand--certain
measures, and that we will brook no delay. Again and again we
have demanded that both the control of credit and the power to
issue money be unqualifiedly taken away from the private banks;
that the soldiers not only receive the bonus they with their
blood and anguish so richly earned in '17 and '18, but that the
amount agreed upon be now doubled; that all swollen incomes be
severely limited and inheritances cut to such small sums as may
support the heirs only in youth and in old age; that labor and
farmers' unions be not merely recognized as instruments for joint
bargaining but be made, like the syndicates in Italy, official
parts of the government, representing the toilers; and that
International Jewish Finance and, equally, International Jewish
Communism and Anarchism and Atheism be, with all the stern
solemnity and rigid inflexibility this great nation can show,
barred from all activity. Those of you who have listened to me
before will understand that I--or rather that the League of
Forgotten Men--has no quarrel with individual Jews; that we are
proud to have Rabbis among our directors; but those subversive
international organizations which, unfortunately, are so largely
Jewish, must be driven with whips and scorpions from off the face
of the earth.

"These demands we have made, and how long now, O Lord, how
long, have the politicians and the smirking representatives of
Big Business pretended to listen, to obey? 'Yes--yes--my masters
of the League of Forgotten Men--yes, we understand--just give us
time!'

"There is no more time! Their time is over and all their
unholy power!

"The conservative Senators--the United States Chamber of
Commerce--the giant bankers--the monarchs of steel and motors and
electricity and coal--the brokers and the holding-companies--they
are all of them like the Bourbon kings, of whom it was said that
'they forgot nothing and they learned nothing.'

"But they died upon the guillotine!

"Perhaps we can be more merciful to our Bourbons.
Perhaps--perhaps--we can save them from the
guillotine--the gallows--the swift firing-squad. Perhaps we
shall, in our new régime, under our new Constitution, with
our 'New Deal' that really will be a New Deal and not an
arrogant experiment--perhaps we shall merely make these big bugs
of finance and politics sit on hard chairs, in dingy offices,
toiling unending hours with pen and typewriter as so many
white-collar slaves for so many years have toiled for
them!

"It is, as Senator Berzelius Windrip puts it, 'the zero hour,'
now, this second. We have stopped bombarding the heedless ears of
these false masters. We're 'going over the top.' At last, after
months and months of taking counsel together, the directors of
the League of Forgotten Men, and I myself, announce that in the
coming Democratic national convention we shall, without one
smallest reservation--"

"Listen! Listen! History being made!" Doremus cried at his
heedless family.

"--use the tremendous strength of the millions of League
members to secure the Democratic presidential nomination for
Senator--Berzelius--Windrip--which means,
flatly, that he will be elected--and that we of the League shall
elect him--as President of these United States!

"His program and that of the League do not in all details
agree. But he has implicitly pledged himself to take our advice,
and, at least until election, we shall back him, absolutely--with
our money, with our loyalty, with our votes . . . with our
prayers. And may the Lord guide him and us across the desert of
iniquitous politics and swinishly grasping finance into the
golden glory of the Promised Land! God bless you!"

Mrs. Jessup said cheerily, "Why, Dormouse, that bishop isn't a
Fascist at all--he's a regular Red Radical. But does this
announcement of his mean anything, really?"

Oh, well, Doremus reflected, he had lived with Emma for
thirty-four years, and not oftener than once or twice a year had
he wanted to murder her. Blandly he said, "Why, nothing much
except that in a couple of years now, on the ground of protecting
us, the Buzz Windrip dictatorship will be regimenting everything,
from where we may pray to what detective stories we may
read."

"Fine idea! Out of the frying pan of Windrip and Hitler into
the fire of the New York Daily Worker and Stalin and
automatics! And the Five-Year Plan--I suppose they'd tell me that
it's been decided by the Commissar that each of my mares is to
bear six colts a year now!" snorted Buck Titus; while Dr. Fowler
Greenhill jeered:

6

I'd rather follow a wild-eyed anarchist like Em Goldman, if
they'd bring more johnnycake and beans and spuds into the humble
cabin of the Common Man, than a twenty-four-carat,
college-graduate, ex-cabinet-member statesman that was just
interested in our turning out more limousines. Call me a
socialist or any blame thing you want to, as long as you grab
hold of the other end of the cross-cut saw with me and help slash
the big logs of Poverty and Intolerance to pieces.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

His family--at least his wife and the cook, Mrs. Candy, and
Sissy and Mary, Mrs. Fowler Greenhill--believed that Doremus was
of fickle health; that any cold would surely turn into pneumonia;
that he must wear his rubbers, and eat his porridge, and smoke
fewer cigarettes, and never "overdo." He raged at them; he knew
that though he did get staggeringly tired after a crisis in the
office, a night's sleep made him a little dynamo again, and he
could "turn out copy" faster than his spryest young reporter.

He concealed his dissipations from them like any small boy
from his elders; lied unscrupulously about how many cigarettes he
smoked; kept concealed a flask of Bourbon from which he regularly
had one nip, only one, before he padded to bed; and when he had
promised to go to sleep early, he turned off his light till he
was sure that Emma was slumbering, then turned it on and happily
read till two, curled under the well-loved hand-woven blankets
from a loom up on Mount Terror; his legs twitching like a
dreaming setter's what time the Chief Inspector of the C.I.D.,
alone and unarmed, walked into the counterfeiters' hideout. And
once a month or so he sneaked down to the kitchen at three in the
morning and made himself coffee and washed up everything so that
Emma and Mrs. Candy would never know. . . . He thought they never
knew!

These small deceptions gave him the ripest satisfaction in a
life otherwise devoted to public service, to trying to make Shad
Ledue edge-up the flower beds, to feverishly writing editorials
that would excite 3 per cent of his readers from breakfast time
till noon and by 6 P.M. be eternally forgotten.

Sometimes when Emma came to loaf beside him in bed on a Sunday
morning and put her comfortable arm about his thin
shoulder-blades, she was sick with the realization that he was
growing older and more frail. His shoulders, she thought, were
pathetic as those of an anemic baby. . . . That sadness of hers
Doremus never guessed.

Even just before the paper went to press, even when Shad Ledue
took off two hours and charged an item of two dollars to have the
lawnmower sharpened, instead of filing it himself, even when
Sissy and her gang played the piano downstairs till two on nights
when he did not want to lie awake, Doremus was never
irritable--except, usually, between arising and the first
life-saving cup of coffee.

The wise Emma was happy when he was snappish before breakfast.
It meant that he was energetic and popping with satisfactory
ideas.

After Bishop Prang had presented the crown to Senator Windrip,
as the summer hobbled nervously toward the national political
conventions, Emma was disturbed. For Doremus was silent before
breakfast, and he had rheumy eyes, as though he was worried, as
though he had slept badly. Never was he cranky. She missed
hearing him croaking, "Isn't that confounded idiot, Mrs. Candy,
ever going to bring in the coffee? I suppose she's sitting
there reading her Testament! And will you be so kind as to tell
me, my good woman, why Sissy never gets up for breakfast,
even after the rare nights when she goes to bed at 1 A.M.?
And--and will you look out at that walk! Covered with dead
blossoms. That swine Shad hasn't swept it for a week. I swear, I
am going to fire him, and right away, this morning!"

Emma would have been happy to hear these familiar animal
sounds, and to cluck in answer, "Oh, why, that's terrible! I'll
go tell Mrs. Candy to hustle in the coffee right away!"

But he sat unspeaking, pale, opening his Daily Informer
as though he were afraid to see what news had come in since he
had left the office at ten.

When Doremus, back in the 1920's, had advocated the
recognition of Russia, Fort Beulah had fretted that he was
turning out-and-out Communist.

He, who understood himself abnormally well, knew that far from
being a left-wing radical, he was at most a mild, rather indolent
and somewhat sentimental Liberal, who disliked pomposity, the
heavy humor of public men, and the itch for notoriety which made
popular preachers and eloquent educators and amateur
play-producers and rich lady reformers and rich lady sportswomen
and almost every brand of rich lady come preeningly in to see
newspaper editors, with photographs under their arms, and on
their faces the simper of fake humility. But for all cruelty and
intolerance, and for the contempt of the fortunate for the
unfortunate, he had not mere dislike but testy hatred.

He had alarmed all his fellow editors in northern New England
by asserting the innocence of Tom Mooney, questioning the guilt
of Sacco and Vanzetti, condemning our intrusion in Haiti and
Nicaragua, advocating an increased income tax, writing, in the
1932 campaign, a friendly account of the Socialist candidate,
Norman Thomas (and afterwards, to tell the truth, voting for
Franklin Roosevelt), and stirring up a little local and
ineffective hell regarding the serfdom of the Southern
sharecroppers and the California fruit-pickers. He even suggested
editorially that when Russia had her factories and railroads and
giant farms really going--say, in 1945--she might conceivably be
the pleasantest country in the world for the (mythical!) Average
Man. When he wrote that editorial, after a lunch at which he had
been irritated by the smug croaking of Frank Tasbrough and R. C.
Crowley, he really did get into trouble. He got named Bolshevik,
and in two days his paper lost a hundred and fifty out of its
five thousand circulation.

Yet he was as little of a Bolshevik as Herbert Hoover.

He was, and he knew it, a small-town bourgeois Intellectual.
Russia forbade everything that made his toil worth enduring:
privacy, the right to think and to criticize as he freakishly
pleased. To have his mind policed by peasants in uniform--rather
than that he would live in an Alaska cabin, with beans and a
hundred books and a new pair of pants every three years.

Once, on a motor trip with Emma, he stopped in at a summer
camp of Communists. Most of them were City College Jews or neat
Bronx dentists, spectacled, and smooth-shaven except for foppish
small mustaches. They were hot to welcome these New England
peasants and to explain the Marxian gospel (on which, however,
they furiously differed). Over macaroni and cheese in an
unpainted dining shack, they longed for the black bread of
Moscow. Later, Doremus chuckled to find how much they resembled
the Y.M.C.A. campers twenty miles down the highway--equally
Puritanical, hortatory, and futile, and equally given to silly
games with rubber balls.

Once only had he been dangerously active. He had supported the
strike for union recognition against the quarry company of
Francis Tasbrough. Men whom Doremus had known for years, solid
cits like Superintendent of Schools Emil Staubmeyer, and Charley
Betts of the furniture store, had muttered about "riding him out
of town on a rail." Tasbrough reviled him--even now, eight years
later. After all this, the strike had been lost, and the
strike-leader, an avowed Communist named Karl Pascal, had gone to
prison for "inciting to violence." When Pascal, best of
mechanics, came out, he went to work in a littered little Fort
Beulah garage owned by a friendly, loquacious, belligerent Polish
Socialist named John Pollikop.

All day long Pascal and Pollikop yelpingly raided each other's
trenches in the battle between Social Democracy and Communism,
and Doremus often dropped in to stir them up. That was hard for
Tasbrough, Staubmeyer, Banker Crowley, and Lawyer Kitterick to
bear.

If Doremus had not come from three generations of debt-paying
Vermonters, he would by now have been a penniless wandering
printer . . . and possibly less detached about the Sorrows of the
Dispossessed.

The conservative Emma complained: "How you can tease people
this way, pretending you really like greasy mechanics like
this Pascal (and I suspect you even have a sneaking fondness for
Shad Ledue!) when you could just associate with decent,
prosperous people like Frank--it's beyond me! What they must
think of you, sometimes! They don't understand that you're
really not a Socialist one bit, but really a nice, kind-hearted,
responsible man. Oh, I ought to smack you, Dormouse!"

Not that he liked being called "Dormouse." But then, no one
did so except Emma and, in rare slips of the tongue, Buck Titus.
So it was endurable.

7

When I am protestingly dragged from my study and the family
hearthside into the public meetings that I so much detest, I try
to make my speech as simple and direct as those of the Child
Jesus talking to the Doctors in the Temple.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

Thunder in the mountains, clouds marching down the Beulah
Valley, unnatural darkness covering the world like black fog, and
lightning that picked out ugly scarps of the hills as though they
were rocks thrown up in an explosion.

To such fury of the enraged heavens, Doremus awakened on that
morning of late July.

As abruptly as one who, in the death cell, startles out of
sleep to the realization, "Today they'll hang me!" he sat up,
bewildered, as he reflected that today Senator Berzelius Windrip
would probably be nominated for President.

The Republican convention was over, with Walt Trowbridge as
presidential candidate. The Democratic convention, meeting in
Cleveland, with a good deal of gin, strawberry soda, and sweat,
had finished the committee reports, the kind words said for the
Flag, the assurances to the ghost of Jefferson that he would be
delighted by what, if Chairman Jim Farley consented, would be
done here this week. They had come to the nominations--Senator
Windrip had been nominated by Colonel Dewey Haik, Congressman,
and power in the American Legion. Gratifying applause and hasty
elimination had greeted such Favorite Sons of the several states
as Al Smith, Carter Glass, William McAdoo, and Cordell Hull. Now,
on the twelfth ballot, there were four contestants left, and
they, in order of votes, were Senator Windrip, President Franklin
D. Roosevelt, Senator Robinson of Arkansas, and Secretary of
Labor Frances Perkins.

Great and dramatic shenanigans had happened, and Doremus
Jessup's imagination had seen them all clearly as they were
reported by the hysterical radio and by bulletins from the A.P.
that fell redhot and smoking upon his desk at the Informer
office.

In honor of Senator Robinson, the University of Arkansas brass
band marched in behind a leader riding in an old horse-drawn
buggy which was plastered with great placards proclaiming "Save
the Constitution" and "Robinson for Sanity." The name of Miss
Perkins had been cheered for two hours, while the delegates
marched with their state banners, and President Roosevelt's name
had been cheered for three--cheered affectionately and quite
homicidally, since every delegate knew that Mr. Roosevelt and
Miss Perkins were far too lacking in circus tinsel and general
clownishness to succeed at this critical hour of the nation's
hysteria, when the electorate wanted a ringmaster-revolutionist
like Senator Windrip.

Windrip's own demonstration, scientifically worked up
beforehand by his secretary-press-agent-private-philosopher, Lee
Sarason, yielded nothing to others'. For Sarason had read his
Chesterton well enough to know that there is only one thing
bigger than a very big thing, and that is a thing so very small
that it can be seen and understood.

When Colonel Dewey Haik put Buzz's name in nomination, the
Colonel wound up by shouting, "One thing more! Listen! It is the
special request of Senator Windrip that you do not waste
the time of this history-making assembly by any cheering of his
name--any cheering whatever. We of the League of Forgotten Men
(yes--and Women!) don't want empty acclaim, but a solemn
consideration of the desperate and immediate needs of 60 per cent
of the population of the United States. No cheers--but may
Providence guide us in the most solemn thinking we have ever
done!"

As he finished, down the center aisle came a private
procession. But this was no parade of thousands. There were only
thirty-one persons in it, and the only banners were three flags
and two large placards.

Leading it, in old blue uniforms, were two G.A.R. veterans,
and between, arm-in-arm with them, a Confederate in gray. They
were such very little old men, all over ninety, leaning one on
another and glancing timidly about in the hope that no one would
laugh at them.

The Confederate carried a Virginia regimental banner, torn as
by shrapnel; and one of the Union veterans lifted high a slashed
flag of the First Minnesota.

The dutiful applause which the convention had given to the
demonstrations of other candidates had been but rain-patter
compared with the tempest which greeted the three shaky,
shuffling old men. On the platform the band played, inaudibly,
"Dixie," then "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again," and,
standing on his chair midway of the auditorium, as a plain member
of his state delegation, Buzz Windrip bowed--bowed--bowed and
tried to smile, while tears started from his eyes and he sobbed
helplessly, and the audience began to sob with him.

Following the old men were twelve Legionnaires, wounded in
1918--stumbling on wooden legs, dragging themselves between
crutches; one in a wheel chair, yet so young-looking and gay; and
one with a black mask before what should have been a face. Of
these, one carried an enormous flag, and another a placard
demanding: "Our Starving Families Must Have the Bonus--We Want
Only Justice--We Want Buzz for President."

And leading them, not wounded, but upright and strong and
resolute, was Major General Hermann Meinecke, United States Army.
Not in all the memory of the older reporters had a soldier on
active service ever appeared as a public political agitator. The
press whispered one to another, "That general'll get canned,
unless Buzz is elected--then he'd probably be made Duke of
Hoboken."

Following the soldiers were ten men and women, their toes
through their shoes, and wearing rags that were the more pitiful
because they had been washed and rewashed till they had lost all
color. With them tottered four pallid children, their teeth
rotted out, between them just managing to hold up a placard
declaring, "We Are on Relief. We Want to Become Human Beings
Again. We Want Buzz!"

Twenty feet behind came one lone tall man. The delegates had
been craning around to see what would follow the relief victims.
When they did see, they rose, they bellowed, they clapped. For
the lone man--Few of the crowd had seen him in the flesh; all of
them had seen him a hundred times in press pictures, photographed
among litters of books in his study--photographed in conference
with President Roosevelt and Secretary Ickes--photographed
shaking hands with Senator Windrip--photographed before a
microphone, his shrieking mouth a dark open trap and his lean
right arm thrown up in hysterical emphasis; all of them had heard
his voice on the radio till they knew it as they knew the voices
of their own brothers; all of them recognized, coming through the
wide main entrance, at the end of the Windrip parade, the apostle
of the Forgotten Men, Bishop Paul Peter Prang.

Then the convention cheered Buzz Windrip for four unbroken
hours.

In the detailed descriptions of the convention which the news
bureaus sent following the feverish first bulletins, one
energetic Birmingham reporter pretty well proved that the
Southern battle flag carried by the Confederate veteran had been
lent by the museum in Richmond and the Northern flag by a
distinguished meat-packer of Chicago who was the grandson of a
Civil War general.

Lee Sarason never told anyone save Buzz Windrip that both
flags had been manufactured on Hester Street, New York, in 1929,
for the patriotic drama, Morgan's Riding, and that both
came from a theatrical warehouse.

Before the cheering, as the Windrip parade neared the
platform, they were greeted by Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, the
celebrated author, lecturer, and composer, who--suddenly conjured
onto the platform as if whisked out of the air--sang to the tune
of "Yankee Doodle" words which she herself had written:

Berzelius Windrip went to Wash.,A riding on a hobby--To throw Big Business out, by Gosh,And be the People's Lobby!

Chorus:

Buzz and buzz and keep it up,Our cares and needs he's toting,You are a most ungrateful pup,Unless for Buzz you're voting!

The League of the Forgotten MenDon't like to be forgotten,They went to Washington and thenThey sang, "There's something rotten!"

That joyous battle song was sung on the radio by nineteen
different prima donnas before midnight, by some sixteen million
less vocal Americans within forty-eight hours, and by at least
ninety million friends and scoffers in the struggle that was to
come. All through the campaign, Buzz Windrip was able to get lots
of jolly humor out of puns on going to Wash., and to wash. Walt
Trowbridge, he jeered, wasn't going to either of them!

Yet Lee Sarason knew that in addition to this comic
masterpiece, the cause of Windrip required an anthem more
elevated in thought and spirit, befitting the seriousness of
crusading Americans.

Long after the convention's cheering for Windrip had ended and
the delegates were again at their proper business of saving the
nation and cutting one another's throats, Sarason had Mrs.
Gimmitch sing a more inspirational hymn, with words by Sarason
himself, in collaboration with a quite remarkable surgeon, one
Dr. Hector Macgoblin.

This Dr. Macgoblin, soon to become a national monument, was as
accomplished in syndicated medical journalism, in the reviewing
of books about education and psychoanalysis, in preparing glosses
upon the philosophies of Hegel, Professor Guenther, Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, and Lothrop Stoddard, in the rendition of
Mozart on the violin, in semi-professional boxing, and in the
composition of epic poetry, as he was in the practice of
medicine.

Dr. Macgoblin! What a man!

The Sarason-Macgoblin ode, entitled "Bring Out the Old-time
Musket," became to Buzz Windrip's band of liberators what
"Giovanezza" was to the Italians, "The Horst Wessel Song" to the
Nazis, "The International" to all Marxians. Along with the
convention, the radio millions heard Mrs. Adelaide Tarr
Gimmitch's contralto, rich as peat, chanting:

BRING OUT THE OLD-TIME MUSKET

Dear Lord, we have sinned, we have slumbered,And our flag lies stained in the dust,And the souls of the Past are calling, calling,"Arise from your sloth--you must!"Lead us, O soul of Lincoln,Inspire us, spirit of Lee,To rule all the world for righteousness, To fight for the right, To awe with our might,As we did in 'sixty-three.

Bring out the old-time musket,Rouse up the old-time fire!See, all the world is crumbling,Dreadful and dark and dire.America! Rise and conquerThe world to our heart's desire!

"Great showmanship. P. T. Barnum or Flo Ziegfeld never put on
a better," mused Doremus, as he studied the A.P. flimsies, as he
listened to the radio he had had temporarily installed in his
office. And, much later: "When Buzz gets in, he won't be having
any parade of wounded soldiers. That'll be bad Fascist
psychology. All those poor devils he'll hide away in
institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter
cattle in uniforms. Hm."

The thunderstorm, which had mercifully lulled, burst again in
wrathful menace.

All afternoon the convention balloted, over and over, with no
change in the order of votes for the presidential candidate.
Toward six, Miss Perkins's manager threw her votes to Roosevelt,
who gained then on Senator Windrip. They seemed to have settled
down to an all-night struggle, and at ten in the evening Doremus
wearily left the office. He did not, tonight, want the
sympathetic and extremely feminized atmosphere of his home, and
he dropped in at the rectory of his friend Father Perefixe. There
he found a satisfyingly unfeminized, untalcumized group. The
Reverend Mr. Falck was there. Swart, sturdy young Perefixe and
silvery old Falck often worked together, were fond of each other,
and agreed upon the advantages of clerical celibacy and almost
every other doctrine except the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome.
With them were Buck Titus, Louis Rotenstern, Dr. Fowler
Greenhill, and Banker Crowley, a financier who liked to cultivate
an appearance of free intellectual discussion, though only after
the hours devoted to refusing credit to desperate farmers and
storekeepers.

And not to be forgotten was Foolish the dog, who that
thunderous morning had suspected his master's worry, followed him
to the office, and all day long had growled at Haik and Sarason
and Mrs. Gimmitch on the radio and showed an earnest conviction
that he ought to chew up all flimsies reporting the
convention.

Better than his own glacial white-paneled drawing room with
its portraits of dead Vermont worthies, Doremus liked Father
Perefixe's little study, and its combination of churchliness, of
freedom from Commerce (at least ordinary Commerce), as displayed
in a crucifix and a plaster statuette of the Virgin and a
shrieking red-and-green Italian picture of the Pope, with
practical affairs, as shown in the oak roll-top desk and steel
filing-cabinet and well-worn portable typewriter. It was a pious
hermit's cave with the advantages of leather chairs and excellent
rye highballs.

The night passed as the eight of them (for Foolish too had his
tipple of milk) all sipped and listened; the night passed as the
convention balloted, furiously, unavailingly . . . that congress
six hundred miles away, six hundred miles of befogged night, yet
with every speech, every derisive yelp, coming into the priest's
cabinet in the same second in which they were heard in the hall
at Cleveland.

Father Perefixe's housekeeper (who was sixty-five years old to
his thirty-nine, to the disappointment of all the scandal-loving
local Protestants) came in with scrambled eggs, cold beer.

"When my dear wife was still among us, she used to send me to
bed at midnight," sighed Dr. Falck.

"My wife does now!" said Doremus.

"So does mine--and her a New York girl!" said Louis
Rotenstern.

"Father Steve, here, and I are the only guys with a sensible
way of living," crowed Buck Titus. "Celibates. We can go to bed
with our pants on, or not go to bed at all," and Father Perefixe
murmured, "But it's curious, Buck, what people find to boast
of--you that you're free of God's tyranny and also that you can
go to bed in your pants--Mr. Falck and Dr. Greenhill and I that
God is so lenient with us that some nights He lets us off from
sick-calls and we can go to bed with 'em off! And Louis
because--Listen! Listen! Sounds like business!"

Colonel Dewey Haik, Buzz's proposer, was announcing that
Senator Windrip felt it would be only modest of him to go to his
hotel now, but he had left a letter which he, Haik, would read.
And he did read it, inexorably.

Windrip stated that, just in case anyone did not completely
understand his platform, he wanted to make it all ringingly
clear.

Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the
banks but all for the bankers--except the Jewish bankers, who
were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly
tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and
the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid
workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per
cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United
States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee,
sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them,
that it could defy the World . . . and maybe, if that World was
so impertinent as to defy America in turn, Buzz hinted, he might
have to take it over and run it properly.

Each moment the brassy importunities of the radio seemed to
Doremus the more offensive, while the hillside slept in the heavy
summer night, and he thought about the mazurka of the fireflies,
the rhythm of crickets like the rhythm of the revolving earth
itself, the voluptuous breezes that bore away the stink of cigars
and sweat and whisky breaths and mint chewing-gum that seemed to
come to them from the convention over the sound waves, along with
the oratory.

It was after dawn, and Father Perefixe (unclerically stripped
to shirt-sleeves and slippers) had just brought them in a
grateful tray of onion soup, with a gob of Hamburg steak for
Foolish, when the opposition to Buzz collapsed and hastily, on
the next ballot, Senator Berzelius Windrip was nominated as
Democratic Candidate for President of the United States.

Doremus, Buck Titus, Perefixe, and Falck were for a time too
gloomy for speech--so possibly was the dog Foolish, as well, for
at the turning off of the radio he tail-thumped in only the most
tentative way.

Father Perefixe said tartly, "And I've voted Democratic ever
since I came from Canada and got naturalized, but this time I'm
going to vote Republican. What about you fellows?"

Rotenstern was silent. He did not like Windrip's reference to
Jews. The ones he knew best--no, they were Americans! Lincoln was
his tribal god too, he vowed.

"Me? I'll vote for Walt Trowbridge, of course," growled
Buck.

"So will I," said Doremus. "No! I won't either! Trowbridge
won't have a chance. I think I'll indulge in the luxury of being
independent, for once, and vote Prohibition or the Battle-Creek
bran-and-spinach ticket, or anything that makes some sense!"

It was after seven that morning when Doremus came home, and,
remarkably enough, Shad Ledue, who was supposed to go to work at
seven, was at work at seven. Normally he never left his bachelor
shack in Lower Town till ten to eight, but this morning he was on
the job, chopping kindling. (Oh yes, reflected Doremus--that
probably explained it. Kindling-chopping, if practised early
enough, would wake up everyone in the house.)

Shad was tall and hulking; his shirt was sweat-stained; and as
usual he needed a shave. Foolish growled at him. Doremus
suspected that at some time he had been kicking Foolish. He
wanted to honor Shad for the sweaty shirt, the honest toil, and
all the rugged virtues, but even as a Liberal American
Humanitarian, Doremus found it hard always to keep up the
Longfellow's-Village-Blacksmith-cum-Marx attitude consistently
and not sometimes backslide into a belief that there must be
some crooks and swine among the toilers as, notoriously,
there were so shockingly many among persons with more than $3500
a year.

"Well--been sitting up listening to the radio," purred
Doremus. "Did you know the Democrats have nominated Senator
Windrip?"

"That so?" Shad growled.

"Yes. Just now. How you planning to vote?"

"Well now, I'll tell you, Mr. Jessup." Shad struck an
attitude, leaning on his ax. Sometimes he could be quite pleasant
and condescending, even to this little man who was so ignorant
about coon-hunting and the games of craps and poker.

"I'm going to vote for Buzz Windrip. He's going to fix it so
everybody will get four thousand bucks, immediate, and I'm going
to start a chicken farm. I can make a bunch of money out of
chickens! I'll show some of these guys that think they're so
rich!"

"But, Shad, you didn't have so much luck with chickens when
you tried to raise 'em in the shed back there. You, uh, I'm
afraid you sort of let their water freeze up on 'em in winter,
and they all died, you remember."

"Oh, them? So what! Heck! There was too few of 'em. I'm not
going to waste my time foolin' with just a couple dozen
chickens! When I get five-six thousand of 'em to make it worth my
while, then I'll show you! You bet." And, most
patronizingly: "Buzz Windrip is O.K."

"I'm glad he has your imprimatur."

"Huh?" said Shad, and scowled.

But as Doremus plodded up on the back porch he heard from Shad
a faint derisive:

"O.K., Chief!"

8

I don't pretend to be a very educated man, except maybe
educated in the heart, and in being able to feel for the sorrows
and fear of every ornery fellow human being. Still and all, I've
read the Bible through, from kiver to kiver, like my wife's folks
say down in Arkansas, some eleven times; I've read all the law
books they've printed; and as to contemporaries, I don't guess
I've missed much of all the grand literature produced by Bruce
Barton, Edgar Guest, Arthur Brisbane, Elizabeth Dilling, Walter
Pitkin, and William Dudley Pelley.

This last gentleman I honor not only for his rattling good
yarns, and his serious work in investigating life beyond the
grave and absolutely proving that only a blind fool could fail to
believe in Personal Immortality, but, finally, for his
public-spirited and self-sacrificing work in founding the Silver
Shirts. These true knights, even if they did not attain quite all
the success they deserved, were one of our most noble and
Galahad-like attempts to combat the sneaking, snaky, sinister,
surreptitious, seditious plots of the Red Radicals and other sour
brands of Bolsheviks that incessantly threaten the American
standards of Liberty, High Wages, and Universal Security.

These fellows have Messages, and we haven't got time for
anything in literature except a straight, hard-hitting,
heart-throbbing Message!

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

During the very first week of his campaign, Senator Windrip
clarified his philosophy by issuing his distinguished
proclamation: "The Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten
Men." The fifteen planks, in his own words (or maybe in Lee
Sarason's words, or Dewey Haik's words), were these:

(1) All finance in the country, including banking, insurance,
stocks and bonds and mortgages, shall be under the absolute
control of a Federal Central Bank, owned by the government and
conducted by a Board appointed by the President, which Board
shall, without need of recourse to Congress for legislative
authorization, be empowered to make all regulations governing
finance. Thereafter, as soon as may be practicable, this said
Board shall consider the nationalization and
government-ownership, for the Profit of the Whole People, of all
mines, oilfields, water power, public utilities, transportation,
and communication.

(2) The President shall appoint a commission, equally divided
between manual workers, employers, and representatives of the
Public, to determine which Labor Unions are qualified to
represent the Workers; and report to the Executive, for legal
action, all pretended labor organizations, whether "Company
Unions," or "Red Unions," controlled by Communists and the
so-called "Third International." The duly recognized Unions shall
be constituted Bureaus of the Government, with power of decision
in all labor disputes. Later, the same investigation and official
recognition shall be extended to farm organizations. In this
elevation of the position of the Worker, it shall be emphasized
that the League of Forgotten Men is the chief bulwark against the
menace of destructive and un-American Radicalism.

(3) In contradistinction to the doctrines of Red Radicals,
with their felonious expropriation of the arduously acquired
possessions which insure to aged persons their security, this
League and Party will guarantee Private Initiative and the Right
to Private Property for all time.

(4) Believing that only under God Almighty, to Whom we render
all homage, do we Americans hold our vast Power, we shall
guarantee to all persons absolute freedom of religious worship,
provided, however, that no atheist, agnostic, believer in Black
Magic, nor any Jew who shall refuse to swear allegiance to the
New Testament, nor any person of any faith who refuses to take
the Pledge to the Flag, shall be permitted to hold any public
office or to practice as a teacher, professor, lawyer, judge, or
as a physician, except in the category of Obstetrics.

(5) Annual net income per person shall be limited to $500,000.
No accumulated fortune may at any one time exceed $3,000,000 per
person. No one person shall, during his entire lifetime, be
permitted to retain an inheritance or various inheritances in
total exceeding $2,000,000. All incomes or estates in excess of
the sums named shall be seized by the Federal Government for use
in Relief and in Administrative expenses.

(6) Profit shall be taken out of War by seizing all dividends
over and above 6 per cent that shall be received from the
manufacture, distribution, or sale, during Wartime, of all arms,
munitions, aircraft, ships, tanks, and all other things directly
applicable to warfare, as well as from food, textiles, and all
other supplies furnished to the American or to any allied
army.

(7) Our armaments and the size of our military and naval
establishments shall be consistently enlarged until they shall
equal, but--since this country has no desire for foreign conquest
of any kind--not surpass, in every branch of the forces of
defense, the martial strength of any other single country or
empire in the world. Upon inauguration, this League and Party
shall make this its first obligation, together with the issuance
of a firm proclamation to all nations of the world that our armed
forces are to be maintained solely for the purpose of insuring
world peace and amity.

(8) Congress shall have the sole right to issue money and
immediately upon our inauguration it shall at least double the
present supply of money, in order to facilitate the fluidity of
credit.

(9) We cannot too strongly condemn the un-Christian attitude
of certain otherwise progressive nations in their discriminations
against the Jews, who have been among the strongest supporters of
the League, and who will continue to prosper and to be recognized
as fully Americanized, though only so long as they continue to
support our ideals.

(10) All Negroes shall be prohibited from voting, holding
public office, practicing law, medicine, or teaching in any class
above the grade of grammar school, and they shall be taxed 100
per cent of all sums in excess of $10,000 per family per year
which they may earn or in any other manner receive. In order,
however, to give the most sympathetic aid possible to all Negroes
who comprehend their proper and valuable place in society, all
such colored persons, male or female, as can prove that they have
devoted not less than forty-five years to such suitable tasks as
domestic service, agricultural labor, and common labor in
industries, shall at the age of sixty-five be permitted to appear
before a special Board, composed entirely of white persons, and
upon proof that while employed they have never been idle except
through sickness, they shall be recommended for pensions not to
exceed the sum of $500.00 per person per year, nor to exceed
$700.00 per family. Negroes shall, by definition, be persons with
at least one sixteenth colored blood.

(11) Far from opposing such high-minded and economically sound
methods of the relief of poverty, unemployment, and old age as
the EPIC plan of the Hon. Upton Sinclair, the "Share the Wealth"
and "Every Man a King" proposals of the late Hon. Huey Long to
assure every family $5000 a year, the Townsend plan, the Utopian
plan, Technocracy, and all competent schemes of unemployment
insurance, a Commission shall immediately be appointed by the New
Administration to study, reconcile, and recommend for immediate
adoption the best features in these several plans for Social
Security, and the Hon. Messrs. Sinclair, Townsend, Eugene Reed,
and Howard Scott are herewith invited to in every way advise and
collaborate with that Commission.

(12) All women now employed shall, as rapidly as possible,
except in such peculiarly feminine spheres of activity as nursing
and beauty parlors, be assisted to return to their incomparably
sacred duties as home-makers and as mothers of strong, honorable
future Citizens of the Commonwealth.

(13) Any person advocating Communism, Socialism, or Anarchism,
advocating refusal to enlist in case of war, or advocating
alliance with Russia in any war whatsoever, shall be subject to
trial for high treason, with a minimum penalty of twenty years at
hard labor in prison, and a maximum of death on the gallows, or
other form of execution which the judges may find convenient.

(14) All bonuses promised to former soldiers of any war in
which America has ever engaged shall be immediately paid in full,
in cash, and in all cases of veterans with incomes of less than
$5,000.00 a year, the formerly promised sums shall be
doubled.

(15) Congress shall, immediately upon our inauguration,
initiate amendments to the Constitution providing (a), that the
President shall have the authority to institute and execute all
necessary measures for the conduct of the government during this
critical epoch; (b), that Congress shall serve only in an
advisory capacity, calling to the attention of the President and
his aides and Cabinet any needed legislation, but not acting upon
same until authorized by the President so to act; and (c), that
the Supreme Court shall immediately have removed from its
jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them to be
unconstitutional or by any other judicial action, any or all acts
of the President, his duly appointed aides, or Congress.

Addendum: It shall be strictly understood that, as the
League of Forgotten Men and the Democratic Party, as now
constituted, have no purpose nor desire to carry out any measure
that shall not unqualifiedly meet with the desire of the majority
of voters in these United States, the League and Party regard
none of the above fifteen points as obligatory and unmodifiable
except No. 15, and upon the others they will act or refrain from
acting in accordance with the general desire of the Public, who
shall under the new régime be again granted an individual
freedom of which they have been deprived by the harsh and
restrictive economic measures of former administrations, both
Republican and Democratic.

"But what does it mean?" marveled Mrs. Jessup, when her
husband had read the platform to her. "It's so inconsistent.
Sounds like a combination of Norman Thomas and Calvin Coolidge. I
don't seem to understand it. I wonder if Mr. Windrip understands
it himself?"

"Sure. You bet he does. It mustn't be supposed that because
Windrip gets that intellectual dressmaker Sarason to prettify his
ideas up for him he doesn't recognize 'em and clasp 'em to his
bosom when they're dolled up in two-dollar words. I'll tell you
just what it all means: Articles One and Five mean that if the
financiers and transportation kings and so on don't come through
heavily with support for Buzz they may be threatened with bigger
income taxes and some control of their businesses. But they are
coming through, I hear, handsomely--they're paying for Buzz's
radio and his parades. Two, that by controlling their unions
directly, Buzz's gang can kidnap all Labor into slavery. Three
backs up the security for Big Capital and Four brings the
preachers into line as scared and unpaid press-agents for
Buzz.

"Six doesn't mean anything at all--munition firms with
vertical trusts will be able to wangle one 6 per cent on
manufacture, one on transportation, and one on sales--at least.
Seven means we'll get ready to follow all the European nations in
trying to hog the whole world. Eight means that by inflation, big
industrial companies will be able to buy their outstanding bonds
back at a cent on the dollar, and Nine that all Jews who don't
cough up plenty of money for the robber baron will be punished,
even including the Jews who haven't much to cough up. Ten, that
all well-paying jobs and businesses held by Negroes will be
grabbed by the Poor White Trash among Buzz's worshipers--and that
instead of being denounced they'll be universally praised as
patriotic protectors of Racial Purity. Eleven, that Buzz'll be
able to pass the buck for not creating any real relief for
poverty. Twelve, that women will later lose the vote and the
right to higher education and be foxed out of all decent jobs and
urged to rear soldiers to be killed in foreign wars. Thirteen,
that anybody who opposes Buzz in any way at all can be called a
Communist and scragged for it. Why, under this clause, Hoover and
Al Smith and Ogden Mills--yes, and you and me--will all be
Communists.

"Fourteen, that Buzz thinks enough of the support of the
veterans' vote to be willing to pay high for it--in other
people's money. And Fifteen--well, that's the one lone clause
that really does mean something; and it means that Windrip and
Lee Sarason and Bishop Prang and I guess maybe this Colonel Dewey
Haik and this Dr. Hector Macgoblin--you know, this doctor that
helps write the high-minded hymns for Buzz--they've realized that
this country has gone so flabby that any gang daring enough and
unscrupulous enough, and smart enough not to seem illegal,
can grab hold of the entire government and have all the power and
applause and salutes, all the money and palaces and willin' women
they want.

"They're only a handful, but just think how small Lenin's gang
was at first, and Mussolini's, and Hitler's, and Kemal Pasha's,
and Napoleon's! You'll see all the liberal preachers and
modernist educators and discontented newspapermen and farm
agitators--maybe they'll worry at first, but they'll get caught
up in the web of propaganda, like we all were in the Great War,
and they'll all be convinced that, even if our Buzzy maybe
has got a few faults, he's on the side of the plain
people, and against all the tight old political machines, and
they'll rouse the country for him as the Great Liberator (and
meanwhile Big Business will just wink and sit tight!) and then,
by God, this crook--oh, I don't know whether he's more of a crook
or an hysterical religious fanatic--along with Sarason and Haik
and Prang and Macgoblin--these five men will be able to set up a
régime that'll remind you of Henry Morgan the pirate
capturing a merchant ship."

"But will Americans stand for it long?" whimpered Emma. "Oh,
no, not people like us--the descendants of the pioneers!"

"Dunno. I'm going to try help see that they don't. . . . Of
course you understand that you and I and Sissy and Fowler and
Mary will probably be shot if I do try to do anything. . . . Hm!
I sound brave enough now, but probably I'll be scared to death
when I hear Buzz's private troops go marching by!"

"Oh, you will be careful, won't you?" begged Emma. "Oh. Before
I forget it. How many times must I tell you, Dormouse, not to
give Foolish chicken bones--they'll stick in his poor throat and
choke him to death. And you just never remember to take
the keys out of the car when you put it in the garage at night!
I'm perfectly sure Shad Ledue or somebody will steal it
one of these nights!"

Father Stephen Perefixe, when he read the Fifteen Points, was
considerably angrier than Doremus.

He snorted, "What? Negroes, Jews, women--they all banned and
they leave us Catholics out, this time? Hitler didn't neglect us.
He's persecuted us. Must be that Charley Coughlin. He's
made us too respectable!"

Sissy, who was eager to go to a school of architecture and
become a creator of new styles in houses of glass and steel;
Lorinda Pike, who had plans for a Carlsbad-Vichy-Saratoga in
Vermont; Mrs. Candy, who aspired to a home bakery of her own when
she should be too old for domestic labor--they were all of them
angrier than either Doremus or Father Perefixe.

Sissy sounded not like a flirtatious girl but like a battling
woman as she snarled, "So the League of Forgotten Men is going to
make us a League of Forgotten Women! Send us back to washing
diapers and leaching out ashes for soap! Let us read Louisa May
Alcott and Barne--except on the Sabbath, of course! Let us sleep
in humble gratitude with men--"

"Sissy!" wailed her mother.

"--like Shad Ledue! Well, Dad, you can sit right down and
write Busy Berzelius for me that I'm going to England on the next
boat!"

Mrs. Candy stopped drying the water glasses (with the soft
dishtowels which she scrupulously washed out daily) long enough
to croak, "What nasty men! I do hope they get shot soon," which
for Mrs. Candy was a startlingly long and humanitarian
statement.

"Yes. Nasty enough. But what I've got to keep remembering is
that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He
didn't plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent
there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of
Plutocracy--oh, if it hadn't been one Windrip, it'd been another.
. . . We had it coming, we Respectables. . . . But that isn't
going to make us like it!" thought Doremus.

9

Those who have never been on the inside in the Councils of
State can never realize that with really high-class Statesmen,
their chief quality is not political canniness, but a big, rich,
overflowing Love for all sorts and conditions of people and for
the whole land. That Love and that Patriotism have been my sole
guiding principles in Politics. My one ambition is to get all
Americans to realize that they are, and must continue to be, the
greatest Race on the face of this old Earth, and second, to
realize that whatever apparent Differences there may be among us,
in wealth, knowledge, skill, ancestry or strength--though, of
course, all this does not apply to people who are racially
different from us--we are all brothers, bound together in the
great and wonderful bond of National Unity, for which we should
all be very glad. And I think we ought to for this be willing to
sacrifice any individual gains at all.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

Berzelius Windrip, of whom in late summer and early autumn of
1936 there were so many published photographs--showing him
popping into cars and out of aeroplanes, dedicating bridges,
eating corn pone and side-meat with Southerners and clam chowder
and bran with Northerners, addressing the American Legion, the
Liberty League, the Y.M.H.A., the Young People's Socialist
League, the Elks, the Bartenders' and Waiters' Union, the
Anti-Saloon League, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
in Afghanistan--showing him kissing lady centenarians and shaking
hands with ladies called Madame, but never the opposite--showing
him in Savile Row riding-clothes on Long Island and in overalls
and a khaki shirt in the Ozarks--this Buzz Windrip was almost a
dwarf, yet with an enormous head, a bloodhound head, of huge
ears, pendulous cheeks, mournful eyes. He had a luminous,
ungrudging smile which (declared the Washington correspondents)
he turned on and off deliberately, like an electric light, but
which could make his ugliness more attractive than the simpers of
any pretty man.

His hair was so coarse and black and straight, and worn so
long in the back, that it hinted of Indian blood. In the Senate
he preferred clothes that suggested the competent insurance
salesman, but when farmer constituents were in Washington he
appeared in an historic ten-gallon hat with a mussy gray
"cutaway" which somehow you erroneously remembered as a black
"Prince Albert."

In that costume, he looked like a sawed-off museum model of a
medicine-show "doctor," and indeed it was rumored that during one
law-school vacation Buzz Windrip had played the banjo and done
card tricks and handed down medicine bottles and managed the
shell game for no less scientific an expedition than Old Dr.
Alagash's Traveling Laboratory, which specialized in the Choctaw
Cancer Cure, the Chinook Consumption Soother, and the Oriental
Remedy for Piles and Rheumatism Prepared from a World-old Secret
Formula by the Gipsy Princess, Queen Peshawara. The company,
ardently assisted by Buzz, killed off quite a number of persons
who, but for their confidence in Dr. Alagash's bottles of water,
coloring matter, tobacco juice, and raw corn whisky, might have
gone early enough to doctors. But since then, Windrip had
redeemed himself, no doubt, by ascending from the vulgar fraud of
selling bogus medicine, standing in front of a megaphone, to the
dignity of selling bogus economics, standing on an indoor
platform under mercury-vapor lights in front of a microphone.

He was in stature but a small man, yet remember that so were
Napoleon, Lord Beaverbrook, Stephen A. Douglas, Frederick the
Great, and the Dr. Goebbels who is privily known throughout
Germany as "Wotan's Mickey Mouse."

Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator
Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of
bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost
illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas"
almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a
traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more
celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.

Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words
of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His
political platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years
before his present credo--derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler,
Gottfried Feder, Rocco, and probably the revue Of Thee I
Sing--little Buzz, back home, had advocated nothing more
revolutionary than better beef stew in the county poor-farms, and
plenty of graft for loyal machine politicians, with jobs for
their brothers-in-law, nephews, law partners, and creditors.

Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of
oratory, but he had been told by political reporters that under
the spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home
you could not remember anything he had said.

There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished
this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no
more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor
even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from
mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would
also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and
in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his
crowds with figures and facts--figures and facts that were
inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely
incorrect.

But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural
ability to be authentically excited by and with his audience, and
they by and with him. He could dramatize his assertion that he
was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat--a homespun
Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat--and
(sans scenery and costume) make you see him veritably defending
the Capitol against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently
presented as his own warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every
anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe.

Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional
Common Man.

Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and
aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the
desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes
with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes
in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs,
all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy
with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry
Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get
Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the
superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He
regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking,
poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners,
possibly excepting the British, as degenerate.

But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his
oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his
every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw
him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in
worship.

In the greatest of all native American arts (next to the
talkies, and those Spirituals in which Negroes express their
desire to go to heaven, to St. Louis, or almost any place distant
from the romantic old plantations), namely, in the art of
Publicity, Lee Sarason was in no way inferior even to such
acknowledged masters as Edward Bernays, the late Theodore
Roosevelt, Jack Dempsey, and Upton Sinclair.

Sarason had, as it was scientifically called, been "building
up" Senator Windrip for seven years before his nomination as
President. Where other Senators were encouraged by their
secretaries and wives (no potential dictator ought ever to have a
visible wife, and none ever has had, except Napoleon) to expand
from village back-slapping to noble, rotund, Ciceronian gestures,
Sarason had encouraged Windrip to keep up in the Great World all
of the clownishness which (along with considerable legal
shrewdness and the endurance to make ten speeches a day) had
endeared him to his simple-hearted constituents in his native
state.

Windrip danced a hornpipe before an alarmed academic audience
when he got his first honorary degree; he kissed Miss Flandreau
at the South Dakota beauty contest; he entertained the Senate, or
at least the Senate galleries, with detailed accounts of how to
catch catfish--from the bait-digging to the ultimate effects of
the jug of corn whisky; he challenged the venerable Chief Justice
of the Supreme Court to a duel with sling-shots.

Though she was not visible, Windrip did have a wife--Sarason
had none, nor was likely to; and Walt Trowbridge was a widower.
Buzz's lady stayed back home, raising spinach and chickens and
telling the neighbors that she expected to go to Washington
next year, the while Windrip was informing the press that
his "Frau" was so edifyingly devoted to their two small children
and to Bible study that she simply could not be coaxed to come
East.

But when it came to assembling a political machine, Windrip
had no need of counsel from Lee Sarason.

Where Buzz was, there were the vultures also. His hotel suite,
in the capital city of his home state, in Washington, in New
York, or in Kansas City, was like--well, Frank Sullivan once
suggested that it resembled the office of a tabloid newspaper
upon the impossible occasion of Bishop Cannon's setting fire to
St. Patrick's Cathedral, kidnaping the Dionne quintuplets, and
eloping with Greta Garbo in a stolen tank.

In the "parlor" of any of these suites, Buzz Windrip sat in
the middle of the room, a telephone on the floor beside him, and
for hours he shrieked at the instrument, "Hello--yuh--speaking,"
or at the door, "Come in--come in!" and "Sit down 'n' take a load
off your feet!" All day, all night till dawn, he would be
bellowing, "Tell him he can take his bill and go climb a tree,"
or "Why certainly, old man--tickled to death to support
it--utility corporations cer'nly been getting a raw deal," and
"You tell the Governor I want Kippy elected sheriff and I want
the indictment against him quashed and I want it damn quick!"
Usually, squatted there cross-legged, he would be wearing a smart
belted camel's-hair coat with an atrocious checked cap.

In a fury, as he was at least every quarter hour, he would
leap up, peel off the overcoat (showing either a white boiled
shirt and clerical black bow, or a canary-yellow silk shirt with
a scarlet tie), fling it on the floor, and put it on again with
slow dignity, while he bellowed his anger like Jeremiah cursing
Jerusalem, or like a sick cow mourning its kidnaped young.

There came to him stockbrokers, labor leaders, distillers,
anti-vivisectionists, vegetarians, disbarred shyster lawyers,
missionaries to China, lobbyists for oil and electricity,
advocates of war and of war against war. "Gaw! Every guy in the
country with a bad case of the gimmes comes to see me!" he
growled to Sarason. He promised to further their causes, to get
an appointment to West Point for the nephew who had just lost his
job in the creamery. He promised fellow politicians to support
their bills if they would support his. He gave interviews upon
subsistence farming, backless bathing suits, and the secret
strategy of the Ethiopian army. He grinned and knee-patted and
back-slapped; and few of his visitors, once they had talked with
him, failed to look upon him as their Little Father and to
support him forever. . . . The few who did fail, most of them
newspapermen, disliked the smell of him more than before they had
met him. . . . Even they, by the unusual spiritedness and color
of their attacks upon him, kept his name alive in every column. .
. . By the time he had been a Senator for one year, his machine
was as complete and smooth-running--and as hidden away from
ordinary passengers--as the engines of a liner.

On the beds in any of his suites there would, at the same
time, repose three top-hats, two clerical hats, a green object
with a feather, a brown derby, a taxi-driver's cap, and nine
ordinary, Christian brown felts.

Once, within twenty-seven minutes, he talked on the telephone
from Chicago to Palo Alto, Washington, Buenos Aires, Wilmette,
and Oklahoma City. Once, in half a day, he received sixteen calls
from clergymen asking him to condemn the dirty burlesque show,
and seven from theatrical promoters and real-estate owners asking
him to praise it. He called the clergymen "Doctor" or "Brother"
or both; he called the promoters "Buddy" and "Pal"; he gave
equally ringing promises to both; and for both he loyally did
nothing whatever.

Normally, he would not have thought of cultivating foreign
alliances, though he never doubted that some day, as President,
he would be leader of the world orchestra. Lee Sarason insisted
that Buzz look into a few international fundamentals, such as the
relationship of sterling to the lira, the proper way in which to
address a baronet, the chances of the Archduke Otto, the London
oyster bars and the brothels near the Boulevard de Sebastopol
best to recommend to junketing Representatives.

But the actual cultivation of foreign diplomats resident in
Washington he left to Sarason, who entertained them on terrapin
and canvasback duck with black-currant jelly, in his apartment
that was considerably more tapestried than Buzz's own
ostentatiously simple Washington quarters. . . . However, in
Sarason's place, a room with a large silk-hung Empire double bed
was reserved for Buzz.

It was Sarason who had persuaded Windrip to let him write
ZeroHour, based on Windrip's own dictated notes,
and who had beguiled millions into reading--and even thousands
into buying--that Bible of Economic Justice; Sarason who had
perceived there was now such a spate of private political
weeklies and monthlies that it was a distinction not to publish
one; Sarason who had the inspiration for Buzz's emergency radio
address at 3 A.M. upon the occasion of the Supreme Court's
throttling the N.R.A., in May, 1935. . . . Though not many
adherents, including Buzz himself, were quite certain as to
whether he was pleased or disappointed; though not many actually
heard the broadcast itself, everyone in the country except
sheep-herders and Professor Albert Einstein heard about it and
was impressed.

Yet it was Buzz who all by himself thought of first offending
the Duke of York by refusing to appear at the Embassy dinner for
him in December, 1935, thus gaining, in all farm kitchens and
parsonages and barrooms, a splendid reputation for Homespun
Democracy; and of later mollifying His Highness by calling on him
with a touching little home bouquet of geraniums (from the
hothouse of the Japanese ambassador), which endeared him, if not
necessarily to Royalty yet certainly to the D.A.R., the
English-Speaking Union, and all motherly hearts who thought the
pudgy little bunch of geraniums too sweet for anything.

By the newspapermen Buzz was credited with having insisted on
the nomination of Perley Beecroft for vice-president at the
Democratic convention, after Doremus Jessup had frenetically
ceased listening. Beecroft was a Southern tobacco-planter and
storekeeper, an ex-Governor of his state, married to an
ex-schoolteacher from Maine who was sufficiently scented with
salt spray and potato blossoms to win any Yankee. But it was not
his geographical superiority which made Mr. Beecroft the perfect
running mate for Buzz Windrip but that he was malaria-yellowed
and laxly mustached, where Buzz's horsey face was ruddy and
smooth; while Beecroft's oratory had a vacuity, a profundity of
slowly enunciated nonsense, which beguiled such solemn deacons as
were irritated by Buzz's cataract of slang.

Nor could Sarason ever have convinced the wealthy that the
more Buzz denounced them and promised to distribute their
millions to the poor, the more they could trust his "common
sense" and finance his campaign. But with a hint, a grin, a wink,
a handshake, Buzz could convince them, and their contributions
came in by the hundred thousand, often disguised as assessments
on imaginary business partnerships.

It had been the peculiar genius of Berzelius Windrip not to
wait until he should be nominated for this office or that to
begin shanghaiing his band of buccaneers. He had been coaxing in
supporters ever since the day when, at the age of four, he had
captivated a neighborhood comrade by giving him an ammonia pistol
which later he thriftily stole back from the comrade's pocket.
Buzz might not have learned, perhaps could not have learned, much
from sociologists Charles Beard and John Dewey, but they could
have learned a great deal from Buzz.

And it was Buzz's, not Sarason's, master stroke that, as
warmly as he advocated everyone's getting rich by just voting to
be rich, he denounced all "Fascism" and "Nazi-ism," so that most
of the Republicans who were afraid of Democratic Fascism, and all
the Democrats who were afraid of Republican Fascism, were ready
to vote for him.

10

While I hate befogging my pages with scientific technicalities
and even neologies, I feel constrained to say here that the most
elementary perusal of the Economy of Abundance would convince any
intelligent student that the Cassandras who miscall the
much-needed increase in the fluidity of our currential
circulation "Inflation," erroneously basing their parallel upon
the inflationary misfortunes of certain European nations in the
era 1919-1923, fallaciously and perhaps inexcusably fail to
comprehend the different monetary status in America inherent in
our vastly greater reservoir of Natural Resources.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

Most of the mortgaged farmers.

Most of the white-collar workers who had been unemployed these
three years and four and five.

Most of the people on relief rolls who wanted more relief.

Most of the suburbanites who could not meet the installment
payments on the electric washing machine.

Such large sections of the American Legion as believed that
only Senator Windrip would secure for them, and perhaps increase,
the bonus.

Such popular Myrtle Boulevard or Elm Avenue preachers as,
spurred by the examples of Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin,
believed they could get useful publicity out of supporting a
slightly queer program that promised prosperity without anyone's
having to work for it.

The remnants of the Kuklux Klan, and such leaders of the
American Federation of Labor as felt they had been inadequately
courted and bepromised by the old-line politicians, and the
non-unionized common laborers who felt they had been inadequately
courted by the same A.F. of L.

Back-street and over-the-garage lawyers who had never yet
wangled governmental jobs.

The Lost Legion of the Anti-Saloon League--since it was known
that, though he drank a lot, Senator Windrip also praised
teetotalism a lot, while his rival, Walt Trowbridge, though he
drank but little, said nothing at all in support of the Messiahs
of Prohibition. These messiahs had not found professional
morality profitable of late, with the Rockefellers and Wanamakers
no longer praying with them nor paying.

Besides these necessitous petitioners, a goodish number of
burghers who, while they were millionaires, yet maintained that
their prosperity had been sorely checked by the fiendishness of
the bankers in limiting their credit.

These were the supporters who looked to Berzelius Windrip to
play the divine raven and feed them handsomely when he should
become President, and from such came most of the fervid
elocutionists who campaigned for him through September and
October.

Pushing in among this mob of camp followers who identified
political virtue with money for their rent came a flying squad
who suffered not from hunger but from congested idealism:
Intellectuals and Reformers and even Rugged Individualists, who
saw in Windrip, for all his clownish swindlerism, a free vigor
which promised a rejuvenation of the crippled and senile
capitalistic system.

Upton Sinclair wrote about Buzz and spoke for him just as in
1917, unyielding pacifist though he was, Mr. Sinclair had
advocated America's whole-hearted prosecution of the Great War,
foreseeing that it would unquestionably exterminate German
militarism and thus forever end all wars. Most of the Morgan
partners, though they may have shuddered a little at association
with Upton Sinclair, saw that, however much income they
themselves might have to sacrifice, only Windrip could start the
Business Recovery; while Bishop Manning of New York City pointed
out that Windrip always spoke reverently of the church and its
shepherds, whereas Walt Trowbridge went horseback-riding every
Sabbath morning and had never been known to telegraph any female
relative on Mother's Day.

On the other hand, the Saturday Evening Post enraged
the small shopkeepers by calling Wmdrip a demagogue, and the New
York Times, once Independent Democrat, was anti-Windrip.
But most of the religious periodicals announced that with a saint
like Bishop Prang for backer, Windrip must have been called of
God.

Even Europe joined in.

With the most modest friendliness, explaining that they wished
not to intrude on American domestic politics but only to express
personal admiration for that great Western advocate of peace and
prosperity, Berzelius Windrip, there came representatives of
certain foreign powers, lecturing throughout the land: General
Balbo, so popular here because of his leadership of the flight
from Italy to Chicago in 1933; a scholar who, though he now lived
in Germany and was an inspiration to all patriotic leaders of
German Recovery, yet had graduated from Harvard University and
had been the most popular piano-player in his class--namely, Dr.
Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstängl; and Great Britain's lion of
diplomacy, the Gladstone of the 1930's, the handsome and gracious
Lord Lossiemouth who, as Prime Minister, had been known as the
Rt. Hon. Ramsay MacDonald, P.C.

All three of them were expensively entertained by the wives of
manufacturers, and they persuaded many millionaires who, in the
refinement of wealth, had considered Buzz vulgar, that actually
he was the world's one hope of efficient international
commerce.

Father Coughlin took one look at all the candidates and
indignantly retired to his cell.

Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, who would surely have written to
the friends she had made at the Rotary Club Dinner in Fort Beulah
if she could only have remembered the name of the town, was a
considerable figure in the campaign. She explained to women
voters how kind it was of Senator Windrip to let them go on
voting, so far; and she sang "Berzelius Windrip's gone to Wash."
an average of eleven times a day.

Buzz himself, Bishop Prang, Senator Porkwood (the fearless
Liberal and friend of labor and the farmers), and Colonel Osceola
Luthorne, the editor, though their prime task was reaching
millions by radio, also, in a forty-day tram trip, traveled over
27,000 miles, through every state in the Union, on the
scarlet-and-silver, ebony-paneled, silk-upholstered, streamlined,
Diesel-engined, rubber-padded, air-conditioned, aluminum
Forgotten Men Special.

It had a private bar that was forgotten by none save the
Bishop.

The train fares were the generous gift of the combined
railways.

Over six hundred speeches were discharged, ranging from
eight-minute hallos delivered to the crowds gathered at stations,
to two-hour fulminations in auditoriums and fairgrounds. Buzz was
present at every speech, usually starring, but sometimes so
hoarse that he could only wave his hand and croak, "Howdy,
folks!" while he was spelled by Prang, Porkwood, Colonel
Luthorne, or such volunteers from his regiment of secretaries,
doctoral consulting specialists in history and economics, cooks,
bartenders, and barbers, as could be lured away from playing
craps with the accompanying reporters, photographers,
sound-recorders, and broadcasters. Tieffer of the United Press
has estimated that Buzz thus appeared personally before more than
two million persons.

Meanwhile, almost daily hurtling by aeroplane between
Washington and Buzz's home, Lee Sarason supervised dozens of
telephone girls and scores of girl stenographers, who answered
thousands of daily telephone calls and letters and telegrams and
cables--and boxes containing poisoned candy. . . . Buzz himself
had made the rule that all these girls must be pretty,
reasonable, thoroughly skilled, and related to people with
political influence.

For Sarason it must be said that in this bedlam of "public
relations" he never once used contact as a transitive
verb.

Colonel Dewey Haik, who had nominated Buzz at Cleveland, had
an assignment unique in campaigning--one of Sarason's slickest
inventions. Haik spoke for Windrip not in the most frequented,
most obvious places, but at places so unusual that his appearance
there made news--and Sarason and Haik saw to it that there were
nimble chroniclers present to get that news. Flying in his own
plane, covering a thousand miles a day, he spoke to nine
astonished miners whom he caught in a copper mine a mile below
the surface--while thirty-nine photographers snapped the nine; he
spoke from a motorboat to a stilled fishing fleet during a fog in
Gloucester harbor; he spoke from the steps of the Sub-Treasury at
noon on Wall Street; he spoke to the aviators and ground crew at
Shushan Airport, New Orleans--and even the flyers were ribald
only for the first five minutes, till he had described Buzz
Windrip's gallant but ludicrous efforts to learn to fly; he spoke
to state policemen, to stamp-collectors, players of chess in
secret clubs, and steeplejacks at work; he spoke in breweries,
hospitals, magazine offices, cathedrals, crossroad churches
forty-by-thirty, prisons, lunatic asylums, night clubs--till the
art editors began to send photographers the memo: "For Pete's
sake, no more fotos Kunnel Haik spieling in sporting houses and
hoose-gow."

Yet went on using the pictures.

For Colonel Dewey Haik was a figure as sharp-lighted, almost,
as Buzz Windrip himself. Son of a decayed Tennessee family, with
one Confederate general grandfather and one a Dewey of Vermont,
he had picked cotton, become a youthful telegraph operator,
worked his way through the University of Arkansas and the
University of Missouri law school, settled as a lawyer in a
Wyoming village and then in Oregon, and during the war (he was in
1936 but forty-four years old) served in France as captain of
infantry, with credit. Returned to America, he had been elected
to Congress, and become a colonel in the militia. He studied
military history; he learned to fly, to box, to fence; he was a
ramrod-like figure yet had a fairly amiable smile; he was liked
equally by disciplinary army officers of high rank, and by such
roughnecks as Mr. Shad Ledue, the Caliban of Doremus Jessup.

Haik brought to Buzz's fold the very picaroons who had most
snickered at Bishop Prang's solemnity.

All this while, Hector Macgoblin, the cultured doctor and
burly boxing fan, co-author with Sarason of the campaign anthem,
"Bring Out the Old-time Musket," was specializing in the
inspiration of college professors, associations of high-school
teachers, professional baseball teams, training-camps of
pugilists, medical meetings, summer schools in which well-known
authors taught the art of writing to earnest aspirants who could
never learn to write, golf tournaments, and all such cultural
congresses.

But the pugilistic Dr. Macgoblin came nearer to danger than
any other campaigner. During a meeting in Alabama, where he had
satisfactorily proved that no Negro with less than 25 per cent
"white blood" can ever rise to the cultural level of a
patent-medicine salesman, the meeting was raided, the costly
residence section of the whites was raided, by a band of colored
people headed by a Negro who had been a corporal on the Western
Front in 1918. Macgoblin and the town were saved by the eloquence
of a colored clergyman.

Truly, as Bishop Prang said, the apostles of Senator Windrip
were now preaching his Message unto all manner of men, even unto
the Heathen.

But what Doremus Jessup said, to Buck Titus and Father
Perefixe, was:

"This is Revolution in terms of Rotary."

11

When I was a kid, one time I had an old-maid teacher that used
to tell me, "Buzz, you're the thickest-headed dunce in school."
But I noticed that she told me this a whole lot oftener than she
used to tell the other kids how smart they were, and I came to be
the most talked-about scholar in the whole township. The United
States Senate isn't so different, and I want to thank a lot of
stuffed shirts for their remarks about Yours Truly.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

But there were certain of the Heathen who did not heed those
heralds Prang and Windrip and Haik and Dr. Macgoblin.

Walt Trowbridge conducted his campaign as placidly as though
he were certain to win. He did not spare himself, but he did not
moan over the Forgotten Men (he'd been one himself, as a
youngster, and didn't think it was so bad!) nor become hysterical
at a private bar in a scarlet-and-silver special tram. Quietly,
steadfastly, speaking on the radio and in a few great halls, he
explained that he did advocate an enormously improved
distribution of wealth, but that it must be achieved by steady
digging and not by dynamite that would destroy more than it
excavated. He wasn't particularly thrilling. Economics rarely
are, except when they have been dramatized by a Bishop, staged
and lighted by a Sarason, and passionately played by a Buzz
Windrip with rapier and blue satin tights.

For the campaign the Communists had brightly brought out their
sacrificial candidates--in fact, all seven of the current
Communist parties had. Since, if they all stuck together, they
might entice 900,000 votes, they had avoided such bourgeois
grossness by enthusiastic schisms, and their creeds now included:
The Party, the Majority Party, the Leftist Party, the
Trotzky Party, the Christian Communist Party, the Workers' Party,
and, less baldly named, something called the American Nationalist
Patriotic Cooperative Fabian Post-Marxian Communist Party--it
sounded like the names of royalty but was otherwise
dissimilar.

But these radical excursions were not very significant
compared with the new Jeffersonian Party, suddenly fathered by
Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Forty-eight hours after the nomination of Windrip at
Cleveland, President Roosevelt had issued his defiance.

Senator Windrip, he asserted, had been chosen "not by the
brains and hearts of genuine Democrats but by their temporarily
crazed emotions." He would no more support Windrip because he
claimed to be a Democrat than he would support Jimmy Walker.

Yet, he said, he could not vote for the Republican Party, the
"party of intrenched special privilege," however much, in the
past three years, he had appreciated the loyalty, the honesty,
the intelligence of Senator Walt Trowbridge.

Roosevelt made it clear that his Jeffersonian or True
Democratic faction was not a "third party" in the sense that it
was to be permanent. It was to vanish as soon as honest and
coolly thinking men got control again of the old organization.
Buzz Windrip aroused mirth by dubbing it the "Bull Mouse Party,"
but President Roosevelt was joined by almost all the liberal
members of Congress, Democratic or Republican, who had not
followed Walt Trowbridge; by Norman Thomas and the Socialists who
had not turned Communist; by Governors Floyd Olson and Olin
Johnston; and by Mayor La Guardia.

The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the
personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented
integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for
frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually,
not with monetary systems and taxation rates but with baptism by
immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight
whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon,
fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst
in a desert and quenching it with spring water--all the primitive
sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz
Windrip.

Far from the hot-lighted ballrooms where all these
crimson-tuniced bandmasters shrillsquabbled as to which should
lead for the moment the tremendous spiritual jazz, far off in the
cool hills a little man named Doremus Jessup, who wasn't even a
bass drummer but only a citizen editor, wondered in confusion
what he should do to be saved.

He wanted to follow Roosevelt and the Jeffersonian
Party--partly for admiration of the man; partly for the pleasure
of shocking the ingrown Republicanism of Vermont. But he could
not believe that the Jeffersonians would have a chance; he did
believe that, for all the mothball odor of many of his
associates, Walt Trowbridge was a valiant and competent man; and
night and day Doremus bounced up and down Beulah Valley
campaigning for Trowbridge.

Out of his very confusion there came into his writing a
desperate sureness which surprised accustomed readers of the
Informer. For once he was not amused and tolerant. Though
he never said anything worse of the Jeffersonian Party than that
it was ahead of its times, in both editorials and news stories he
went after Buzz Windrip and his gang with whips, turpentine, and
scandal.

In person, he was into and out of shops and houses all morning
long, arguing with voters, getting miniature interviews.

He had expected that traditionally Republican Vermont would
give him too drearily easy a task in preaching Trowbridge. What
he found was a dismaying preference for the theoretically
Democratic Buzz Windrip. And that preference, Doremus perceived,
wasn't even a pathetic trust in Windrip's promises of Utopian
bliss for everyone in general. It was a trust in increased cash
for the voter himself, and for his family, very much in
particular.

Most of them had, among all the factors in the campaign,
noticed only what they regarded as Windrip's humor, and three
planks in his platform: Five, which promised to increase taxes on
the rich; Ten, which condemned the Negroes--since nothing so
elevates a dispossessed farmer or a factory worker on relief as
to have some race, any race, on which he can look down; and,
especially, Eleven, which announced, or seemed to announce, that
the average toiler would immediately receive $5000 a year. (And
ever-so-many railway-station debaters explained that it would
really be $10,000. Why, they were going to have every cent
offered by Dr. Townsend, plus everything planned by the late Huey
Long, Upton Sinclair, and the Utopians, all put together!)

So beatifically did hundreds of old people in Beulah Valley
believe this that they smilingly trotted into Raymond Pridewell's
hardware store, to order new kitchen stoves and aluminum sauce
pans and complete bathroom furnishings, to be paid for on the day
after inauguration. Mr. Pridewell, a cobwebbed old Henry Cabot
Lodge Republican, lost half his trade by chasing out these happy
heirs to fabulous estates, but they went on dreaming, and
Doremus, nagging at them, discovered that mere figures are
defenseless against a dream . . . even a dream of new Plymouths
and unlimited cans of sausages and motion-picture cameras and the
prospect of never having to arise till 7:30 A.M.

Thus answered Alfred Tizra, "Snake" Tizra, friend to Doremus's
handyman, Shad Ledue. Snake was a steel-tough truck-driver and
taxi-owner who had served sentences for assault and for
transporting bootleg liquor. He had once made a living catching
rattlesnakes and copperheads in southern New England. Under
President Windrip, Snake jeeringly assured Doremus, he would have
enough money to start a chain of roadhouses in all the dry
communities in Vermont.

Ed Howland, one of the lesser Fort Beulah grocers, and Charley
Betts, furniture and undertaking, while they were dead against
anyone getting groceries, furniture, or even undertaking on
Windrip credit, were all for the population's having credit on
other wares.

Aras Dilley, a squatter dairy farmer living with a toothless
wife and seven slattern children in a tilted and unscrubbed cabin
way up on Mount Terror, snarled at Doremus--who had often taken
food baskets and boxes of shotgun shells and masses of cigarettes
to Aras--"Well, want to tell you, when Mr. Windrip gets in, we
farmers are going to fix our own prices on our crops, and not you
smart city fellows!"

Lorinda Pike's singularly unpleasant partner in the Beulah
Valley Tavern, one Mr. Nipper, whom she hoped soon to lose,
combined boasting how rich he was with gloating how much more he
was going to get under Windrip. "Professor" Staubmeyer quoted
nice things Windrip had said about higher pay for teachers. Louis
Rotenstern, to prove that his heart, at least, was not Jewish,
became more lyric than any of them. And even Frank Tasbrough of
the quarries, Medary Cole of the grist mill and real-estate
holdings, R. C. Crowley of the bank, who presumably were not
tickled by projects of higher income taxes, smiled
pussy-cattishly and hinted that Windrip was a "lot sounder
fellow" than people knew.

But no one in Fort Beulah was a more active crusader for Buzz
Windrip than Shad Ledue.

Doremus had known that Shad possessed talent for argument and
for display; that he had once persuaded old Mr. Pridewell to
trust him for a .22 rifle, value twenty-three dollars; that,
removed from the sphere of coal bins and grass-stained overalls,
he had once sung "Rollicky Bill the Sailor" at a smoker of the
Ancient and Independent Order of Rams; and that he had enough
memory to be able to quote, as his own profound opinions, the
editorials in the Hearst newspapers. Yet even knowing all this
equipment for a political career, an equipment not much short of
Buzz Windrip's, Doremus was surprised to find Shad soap-boxing
for Windrip among the quarry-workers, then actually as chairman
of a rally in Oddfellows' Hall. Shad spoke little, but with
brutal taunting of the believers in Trowbridge and Roosevelt.

At meetings where he did not speak, Shad was an incomparable
bouncer, and in that valued capacity he was summoned to Windrip
rallies as far away as Burlington. It was he who, in a militia
uniform, handsomely riding a large white plow-horse, led the
final Windrip parade in Rutland . . . and substantial men of
affairs, even dry-goods jobbers, fondly called him "Shad."

Doremus was amazed, felt a little apologetic over his failure
to have appreciated this new-found paragon, as he sat in American
Legion Hall and heard Shad bellowing: "I don't pretend to be
anything but a plain working-stiff, but there's forty million
workers like me, and we know that Senator Windrip is the first
statesman in years that thinks of what guys like us need before
he thinks one doggone thing about politics. Come on, you bozos!
The swell folks tell you to not be selfish! Walt Trowbridge tells
you to not be selfish! Well, be selfish, and vote for the
one man that's willing to give you something--give
you something!--and not just grab off every cent and every
hour of work that he can get!"

Doremus groaned inwardly, "Oh, my Shad! And you're doing most
of this on my time!"

Sissy Jessup sat on the running board of her coupe (hers by
squatter's right), with Julian Falck, up from Amherst for the
week-end, and Malcolm Tasbrough wedged in on either side of
her.

"Oh nuts, let's quit talking politics. Windrip's going to be
elected, so why waste time yodeling when we could drive down to
the river and have a swim," complained Malcolm.

"He's not going to win without our putting up a tough scrap
against him. I'm going to talk to the high-school alumni this
evening--about how they got to tell their parents to vote for
either Trowbridge or Roosevelt," snapped Julian Falck.

"Haa, haa, haa! And of course the parents will be tickled to
death to do whatever you tell 'em, Yulian! You college men
certainly are the goods! Besides--Want to be serious about this
fool business?" Malcolm had the insolent self-assurance of beef,
slick black hair, and a large car of his own; he was the perfect
leader of Black Shirts, and he looked contemptuously on Julian
who, though a year older, was pale and thinnish. "Matter of fact,
it'll be a good thing to have Buzz. He'll put a damn quick stop
to all this radicalism--all this free speech and libel of our
most fundamental institutions--"

"Boston American; last Tuesday; page eight," murmured
Sissy.

"--and no wonder you're scared of him, Yulian! He sure will
drag some of your favorite Amherst anarchist profs off to the
hoosegow, and maybe you too, Comrade!"

The two young men looked at each other with slow fury. Sissy
quieted them by raging, "Freavensake! Will you two heels quit
scrapping? . . . Oh, my dears, this beastly election! Beastly!
Seems as if it's breaking up every town, every home. . . . My
poor Dad! Doremus is just about all in!"

12

I shall not be content till this country can produce every
single thing we need, even coffee, cocoa, and rubber, and so keep
all our dollars at home. If we can do this and at the same time
work up tourist traffic so that foreigners will come from every
part of the world to see such remarkable wonders as the Grand
Canyon, Glacier and Yellowstone etc. parks, the fine hotels of
Chicago, & etc., thus leaving their money here, we shall have
such a balance of trade as will go far to carry out my
often-criticized yet completely sound idea of from $3000 to $5000
per year for every single family--that is, I mean every real
American family. Such an aspiring Vision is what we want, and not
all this nonsense of wasting our time at Geneva and talky-talk at
Lugano, wherever that is.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

Election day would fall on Tuesday, November third, and on
Sunday evening of the first, Senator Windrip played the finale of
his campaign at a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden, in New
York. The Garden would hold, with seats and standing room, about
19,000, and a week before the meeting every ticket had been
sold--at from fifty cents to five dollars, and then by
speculators resold and resold, at from one dollar to twenty.

Doremus had been able to get one single ticket from an
acquaintance on one of the Hearst dailies--which, alone among the
New York papers, were supporting Windrip--and on the afternoon of
November first he traveled the three hundred miles to New York
for his first visit in three years.

It had been cold in Vermont, with early snow, but the white
drifts lay to the earth so quietly, in unstained air, that the
world seemed a silver-painted carnival, left to silence. Even on
a moonless night, a pale radiance came from the snow, from the
earth itself, and the stars were drops of quicksilver.

But, following the redcap carrying his shabby Gladstone bag,
Doremus came out of the Grand Central, at six o'clock, into a
gray trickle of cold dishwater from heaven's kitchen sink. The
renowned towers which he expected to see on Forty-second Street
were dead in their mummy cloths of ragged fog. And as to the mob
that, with cruel disinterest, galloped past him, a new and
heedless smear of faces every second, the man from Fort Beulah
could think only that New York must be holding its county fair in
this clammy drizzle, or else that there was a big fire
somewhere.

He had sensibly planned to save money by using the subway--the
substantial village burgher is so poor in the city of the
Babylonian gardens!--and he even remembered that there were still
to be found in Manhattan five-cent trolley cars, in which a
rustic might divert himself by looking at sailors and poets and
shawled women from the steppes of Kazakstan. To the redcap he had
piped with what he conceived to be traveled urbanity, "Guess 'll
take a trolley--jus' few blocks." But deafened and dizzied and
elbow-jabbed by the crowd, soaked and depressed, he took refuge
in a taxi, then wished he hadn't, as he saw the slippery
rubber-colored pavement, and as his taxi got wedged among other
cars stinking of carbon-monoxide and frenziedly tooting for
release from the jam--a huddle of robot sheep bleating their
terror with mechanical lungs of a hundred horsepower.

He painfully hesitated before going out again from his small
hotel in the West Forties, and when he did, when he muddily crept
among the shrill shopgirls, the weary chorus girls, the hard
cigar-clamping gamblers, and the pretty young men on Broadway, he
felt himself, with the rubbers and umbrella which Emma had forced
upon him, a very Caspar Milquetoast.

He most noticed a number of stray imitation soldiers, without
side-arms or rifles, but in a uniform like that of an American
cavalryman in 1870: slant-topped blue forage caps, dark blue
tunics, light blue trousers, with yellow stripes at the seam,
tucked into leggings of black rubberoid for what appeared to be
the privates, and boots of sleek black leather for officers. Each
of them had on the right side of his collar the letters "M.M."
and on the left, a five-pointed star. There were so many of them;
they swaggered so brazenly, shouldering civilians out of the way;
and upon insignificances like Doremus they looked with frigid
insolence.

He suddenly understood.

These young condottieri were the "Minute Men": the private
troops of Berzelius Windrip, about which Doremus had been
publishing uneasy news reports. He was thrilled and a little
dismayed to see them now--the printed words made brutal
flesh.

Three weeks ago Windrip had announced that Colonel Dewey Haik
had founded, just for the campaign, a nationwide league of
Windrip marching-clubs, to be called the Minute Men. It was
probable that they had been in formation for months, since
already they had three or four hundred thousand members. Doremus
was afraid the M.M.'s might become a permanent organization, more
menacing than the Kuklux Klan.

Their uniform suggested the pioneer America of Cold Harbor and
of the Indian fighters under Miles and Custer. Their emblem,
their swastika (here Doremus saw the cunning and mysticism of Lee
Sarason), was a five-pointed star, because the star on the
American flag was five-pointed, whereas the stars of both the
Soviet banner and the Jews--the seal of Solomon--were
six-pointed.

The fact that the Soviet star, actually, was also
five-pointed, no one noticed, during these excited days of
regeneration. Anyway, it was a nice idea to have this star
simultaneously challenge the Jews and the Bolsheviks--the M.M.'s
had good intentions, even if their symbolism did slip a
little.

Yet the craftiest thing about the M.M.'s was that they wore no
colored shirts, but only plain white when on parade, and light
khaki when on outpost duty, so that Buzz Windrip could thunder,
and frequently, "Black shirts? Brown shirts? Red shirts? Yes, and
maybe cow-brindle shirts! All these degenerate European uniforms
of tyranny! No sir! The Minute Men are not Fascist or Communist
or anything at all but plain Democratic--the knight-champions of
the rights of the Forgotten Men--the shock troops of
Freedom!"

Doremus dined on Chinese food, his invariable self-indulgence
when he was in a large city without Emma, who stated that chow
mein was nothing but fried excelsior with flour-paste gravy. He
forgot the leering M.M. troopers a little; he was happy in
glancing at the gilded wood-carvings, at the octagonal lanterns
painted with doll-like Chinese peasants crossing arched bridges,
at a quartette of guests, two male and two female, who looked
like Public Enemies and who all through dinner quarreled with
restrained viciousness.

When he headed toward Madison Square Garden and the
culminating Windrip rally, he was plunged into a maelstrom. A
whole nation seemed querulously to be headed the same way. He
could not get a taxicab, and walking through the dreary storm
some fourteen blocks to Madison Square Garden he was aware of the
murderous temper of the crowd.

Eighth Avenue, lined with cheapjack shops, was packed with
drab, discouraged people who yet, tonight, were tipsy with the
hashish of hope. They filled the sidewalks, nearly filled the
pavement, while irritable motors squeezed tediously through them,
and angry policemen were pushed and whirled about and, if they
tried to be haughty, got jeered at by lively shopgirls.

Through the welter, before Doremus's eyes, jabbed a flying
wedge of Minute Men, led by what he was later to recognize as a
cornet of M.M.'s. They were not on duty, and they were not
belligerent; they were cheering, and singing "Berzelius Windrip
went to Wash.," reminding Doremus of a slightly drunken knot of
students from an inferior college after a football victory. He
was to remember them so afterward, months afterward, when the
enemies of the M.M.'s all through the country derisively called
them "Mickey Mouses" and "Minnies."

An old man, shabbily neat, stood blocking them and yelled, "To
hell with Buzz! Three cheers for F.D.R.!"

The M.M.'s burst into hoodlum wrath. The cornet in command, a
bruiser uglier even than Shad Ledue, hit the old man on the jaw,
and he sloped down, sickeningly. Then, from nowhere, facing the
cornet, there was a chief petty officer of the navy, big,
smiling, reckless. The C.P.O. bellowed, in a voice tuned to
hurricanes, "Swell bunch o' tin soldiers! Nine o' yuh to one
grandpappy! Just about even--"

The cornet socked him; he laid out the cornet with one foul to
the belly; instantly the other eight M.M.'s were on the C.P.O.,
like sparrows after a hawk, and he crashed, his face, suddenly
veal-white, laced with rivulets of blood. The eight kicked him in
the head with their thick marching-shoes. They were still kicking
him when Doremus wriggled away, very sick, altogether
helpless.

He had not turned away quickly enough to avoid seeing an M.M.
trooper, girlish-faced, crimson-lipped, fawn-eyed, throw himself
on the fallen cornet and, whimpering, stroke that roustabout's
roast-beef cheeks with shy gardenia-petal fingers.

There were many arguments, a few private fist fights, and one
more battle, before Doremus reached the auditorium.

A block from it some thirty M.M.'s, headed by a
battalion-leader--something between a captain and a
major--started raiding a street meeting of Communists. A Jewish
girl in khaki, her bare head soaked with rain, was beseeching
from the elevation of a wheelbarrow, "Fellow travelers! Don't
just chew the rag and 'sympathize'! Join us! Now! It's life and
death!" Twenty feet from the Communists, a middle-aged man who
looked like a social worker was explaining the Jeffersonian
Party, recalling the record of President Roosevelt, and reviling
the Communists next door as word-drunk un-American cranks. Half
his audience were people who might be competent voters; half of
them--like half of any group on this evening of tragic
fiesta--were cigarette-sniping boys in hand-me-downs.

The thirty M.M.'s cheerfully smashed into the Communists. The
battalion leader reached up, slapped the girl speaker, dragged
her down from the wheelbarrow. His followers casually waded in
with fists and blackjacks. Doremus, more nauseated, feeling more
helpless than ever, heard the smack of a blackjack on the temple
of a scrawny Jewish intellectual.

Amazingly, then, the voice of the rival Jeffersonian leader
spiraled up into a scream: "Come on, you! Going to let
those hellhounds attack our Communist friends--friends
now, by God!" With which the mild bookworm leaped into the
air, came down squarely upon a fat Mickey Mouse, capsized him,
seized his blackjack, took time to kick another M.M.'s shins
before arising from the wreck, sprang up, and waded into the
raiders as, Doremus guessed, he would have waded into a table of
statistics on the proportion of butter fat in loose milk in 97.7
per cent of shops on Avenue B.

Till then, only half-a-dozen Communist Party members had been
facing the M.M.'s, their backs to a garage wall. Fifty of their
own, fifty Jeffersonians besides, now joined them, and with
bricks and umbrellas and deadly volumes of sociology they drove
off the enraged M.M.'s--partisans of Bela Kun side by side with
the partisans of Professor John Dewey--until a riot squad of
policemen battered their way in to protect the M.M.'s by
arresting the girl Communist speaker and the Jeffersonian.

Doremus had often "headed up" sports stories about "Madison
Square Garden Prize Fights," but he did know that the place had
nothing to do with Madison Square, from which it was a day's
journey by bus, that it was decidedly not a garden, that the
fighters there did not fight for "prizes" but for fixed
partnership shares in the business, and that a good many of them
did not fight at all.

The mammoth building, as in exhaustion Doremus crawled up to
it, was entirely ringed with M.M.'s, elbow to elbow, all carrying
heavy canes, and at every entrance, along every aisle, the M.M.'s
were rigidly in line, with their officers galloping about,
whispering orders, and bearing uneasy rumors like scared calves
in a dipping-pen.

These past weeks hungry miners, dispossessed farmers, Carolina
mill hands had greeted Senator Windrip with a flutter of worn
hands beneath gasoline torches. Now he was to face, not the
unemployed, for they could not afford fifty-cent tickets, but the
small, scared side-street traders of New York, who considered
themselves altogether superior to clodhoppers and mine-creepers,
yet were as desperate as they. The swelling mass that Doremus
saw, proud in seats or standing chin-to-nape in the aisles, in a
reek of dampened clothes, was not romantic; they were people
concerned with the tailor's goose, the tray of potato salad, the
card of hooks-and-eyes, the leech-like mortgage on the
owner-driven taxi, with, at home, the baby's diapers, the dull
safety-razor blade, the awful rise in the cost of rump steak and
kosher chicken. And a few, and very proud, civil-service clerks
and letter carriers and superintendents of small apartment
houses, curiously fashionable in seventeen-dollar ready-made
suits and feebly stitched foulard ties, who boasted, "I don't
know why all these bums go on relief. I may not be such a wiz,
but let me tell you, even since 1929, I've never made less than
two thousand dollars a year!"

Manhattan peasants. Kind people, industrious people, generous
to their aged, eager to find any desperate cure for the sickness
of worry over losing the job.

Most facile material for any rabble-rouser.

The historic rally opened with extreme dullness. A regimental
band played the Tales from Hoffman barcarole with no
apparent significance and not much more liveliness. The Reverend
Dr. Hendrik Van Lollop of St. Apologue's Lutheran Church offered
prayer, but one felt that probably it had not been accepted.
Senator Porkwood provided a dissertation on Senator Windrip which
was composed in equal parts of apostolic adoration of Buzz and of
the uh-uh-uh's with which Hon. Porkwood always interspersed his
words.

And Windrip wasn't yet even in sight.

Colonel Dewey Haik, nominator of Buzz at the Cleveland
convention, was considerably better. He told three jokes, and an
anecdote about a faithful carrier pigeon in the Great War which
had seemed to understand, really better than many of the human
soldiers, just why it was that the Americans were over there
fighting for France against Germany. The connection of this
ornithological hero with the virtues of Senator Windrip did not
seem evident, but, after having sat under Senator Porkwood, the
audience enjoyed the note of military gallantry.

Doremus felt that Colonel Haik was not merely rambling but
pounding on toward something definite. His voice became more
insistent. He began to talk about Windrip: "my friend--the one
man who dares beard the monetary lion--the man who in his great
and simple heart cherishes the woe of every common man as once
did the brooding tenderness of Abraham Lincoln." Then, wildly
waving toward a side entrance, he shrieked, "And here he comes!
My friends--Buzz Windrip!"

The band hammered out "The Campbells Are Coming." A squadron
of Minute Men, smart as Horse Guards, carrying long lances with
starred pennants, clicked into the gigantic bowl of the
auditorium, and after them, shabby in an old blue-serge suit,
nervously twisting a sweat-stained slouch hat, stooped and tired,
limped Berzelius Windrip. The audience leaped up, thrusting one
another aside to have a look at the deliverer, cheering like
artillery at dawn.

Windrip started prosaically enough. You felt rather sorry for
him, so awkwardly did he lumber up the steps to the platform,
across to the center of the stage. He stopped; stared owlishly.
Then he quacked monotonously:

"The first time I ever came to New York I was a greenhorn--no,
don't laugh, mebbe I still am! But I had already been elected a
United States Senator, and back home, the way they'd serenaded
me, I thought I was some punkins. I thought my name was just
about as familiar to everybody as Al Capone's or Camel Cigarettes
or Castoria--Babies Cry For It. But I come to New York on my way
to Washington, and say, I sat in my hotel lobby here for three
days, and the only fellow ever spoke to me was the hotel
detective! And when he did come up and address me, I was tickled
to death--I thought he was going to tell me the whole burg was
pleased by my condescending to visit 'em. But all he wanted to
know was, was I a guest of the hotel and did I have any right to
be holding down a lobby chair permanently that way! And tonight,
friends, I'm pretty near as scared of Old Gotham as I was
then!"

The laughter, the hand-clapping, were fair enough, but the
proud electors were disappointed by his drawl, his weary
humility.

Doremus quivered hopefully, "Maybe he isn't going to get
elected!"

Windrip outlined his too-familiar platform--Doremus was
interested only in observing that Windrip misquoted his own
figures regarding the limitation of fortunes, in Point Five.

He slid into a rhapsody of general ideas--a mishmash of polite
regards to Justice, Freedom, Equality, Order, Prosperity,
Patriotism, and any number of other noble but slippery
abstractions.

Doremus thought he was being bored, until he discovered that,
at some moment which he had not noticed, he had become absorbed
and excited.

Something in the intensity with which Windrip looked at his
audience, looked at all of them, his glance slowly taking them in
from the highest-perched seat to the nearest, convinced them that
he was talking to each individual, directly and solely; that he
wanted to take each of them into his heart; that he was telling
them the truths, the imperious and dangerous facts, that had been
hidden from them.

"They say I want money--power! Say, I've turned down offers
from law firms right here in New York of three times the money
I'll get as President! And power--why, the President is the
servant of every citizen in the country, and not just of the
considerate folks, but also of every crank that comes pestering
him by telegram and phone and letter. And yet, it's true, it's
absolutely true I do want power, great, big, imperial power--but
not for myself--no--for you!--the power of your permission
to smash the Jew financiers who've enslaved you, who're working
you to death to pay the interest on their bonds; the grasping
bankers--and not all of 'em Jews by a darn sight!--the crooked
labor-leaders just as much as the crooked bosses, and, most of
all, the sneaking spies of Moscow that want you to lick the boots
of their self-appointed tyrants that rule not by love and
loyalty, like I want to, but by the horrible power of the whip,
the dark cell, the automatic pistol!"

He pictured, then, a Paradise of democracy in which, with the
old political machines destroyed, every humblest worker would be
king and ruler, dominating representatives elected from among his
own kind of people, and these representatives not growing
indifferent, as hitherto they had done, once they were far off in
Washington, but kept alert to the public interest by the
supervision of a strengthened Executive.

It sounded almost reasonable, for a while.

The supreme actor, Buzz Windrip, was passionate yet never
grotesquely wild. He did not gesture too extravagantly; only,
like Gene Debs of old, he reached out a bony forefinger which
seemed to jab into each of them and hook out each heart. It was
his mad eyes, big staring tragic eyes, that startled them, and
his voice, now thundering, now humbly pleading, that soothed
them.

He was so obviously an honest and merciful leader; a man of
sorrows and acquaint with woe.

Doremus marveled, "I'll be hanged! Why, he's a darn good sort
when you come to meet him! And warm-hearted. He makes me feel as
if I'd been having a good evening with Buck and Steve Perefixe.
What if Buzz is right? What if--in spite of all the demagogic pap
that, I suppose, he has got to feed out to the boobs--he's right
in claiming that it's only he, and not Trowbridge or Roosevelt,
that can break the hold of the absentee owners? And these Minute
Men, his followers--oh, they were pretty nasty, what I saw out on
the street, but still, most of 'em are mighty nice, clean-cut
young fellows. Seeing Buzz and then listening to what he actually
says does kind of surprise you--kind of make you think!"

But what Mr. Windrip actually had said, Doremus could
not remember an hour later, when he had come out of the
trance.

He was so convinced then that Windrip would win that, on
Tuesday evening, he did not remain at the Informer office
until the returns were all in. But if he did not stay for the
evidences of the election, they came to him.

Past his house, after midnight, through muddy snow tramped a
triumphant and reasonably drunken parade, carrying torches and
bellowing to the air of "Yankee Doodle" new words revealed just
that week by Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch:

"The snakes disloyal to our BuzzWe're riding on a rail,They'll wish to God they never was,When we get them in jail!

Chorus:

"Buzz and buzz and keep it upTo victory he's floated.You were a most ungrateful pup,Unless for Buzz you voted.

"Every M.M. gets a whipTo use upon some traitor,And every Antibuzz we skipToday, we'll tend to later."

"Antibuzz," a word credited to Mrs. Gimmitch but more probably
invented by Dr. Hector Macgoblin, was to be extensively used by
lady patriots as a term expressing such vicious disloyalty to the
State as might call for the firing squad. Yet, like Mrs.
Gimmitch's splendid synthesis "Unkies," for soldiers of the
A.E.F., it never really caught on.

Among the winter-coated paraders Doremus and Sissy thought
they could make out Shad Ledue, Aras Dilley, that
philoprogenitive squatter from Mount Terror, Charley Betts, the
furniture dealer, and Tony Mogliani, the fruit-seller, most
ardent expounder of Italian Fascism in central Vermont.

And, though he could not be sure of it in the dimness behind
the torches, Doremus rather thought that the lone large motorcar
following the procession was that of his neighbor, Francis
Tasbrough.

Next morning, at the Informer office, Doremus did not
learn of so very much damage wrought by the triumphant
Nordics--they had merely upset a couple of privies, torn down and
burned the tailor-shop sign of Louis Rotenstern, and somewhat
badly beaten Clifford Little, the jeweler, a slight, curly-headed
young man whom Shad Ledue despised because he organized
theatricals and played the organ in Mr. Falck's church.

That night Doremus found, on his front porch, a notice in red
chalk upon butcher's paper:

You will get yrs Dorey sweethart unles you get rite down on
yr belly and crawl in front of the MM and the League and the
Chief and I

A friend

It was the first time that Doremus had heard of "the Chief," a
sound American variant of "the Leader" or "the Head of the
Government," as a popular title for Mr. Windrip. It was soon to
be made official.

Doremus burned the red warning without telling his family. But
he often woke to remember it, not very laughingly.

13

And when I get ready to retire I'm going to build me an
up-to-date bungalow in some lovely resort, not in Como or any
other of the proverbial Grecian isles you may be sure, but in
somewheres like Florida, California, Santa Fe, & etc., and
devote myself just to reading the classics, like Longfellow,
James Whitcomb Riley, Lord Macaulay, Henry Van Dyke, Elbert
Hubbard, Plato, Hiawatha, & etc. Some of my friends laugh at
me for it, but I have always cultivated a taste for the finest in
literature. I got it from my Mother as I did everything that some
people have been so good as to admire in me.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

Certain though Doremus had been of Windrip's election, the
event was like the long-dreaded passing of a friend.

"All right. Hell with this country, if it's like that. All
these years I've worked--and I never did want to be on all these
committees and boards and charity drives!--and don't they
look silly now! What I always wanted to do was to sneak off to an
ivory tower--or anyway, celluloid, imitation ivory--and read
everything I've been too busy to read."

Thus Doremus, in late November.

And he did actually attempt it, and for a few days reveled in
it, avoiding everyone save his family and Lorinda, Buck Titus,
and Father Perefixe. Mostly, though, he found that he did not
relish the "classics" he had so far missed, but those familiar to
his youth: Ivanhoe, Huckleberry Finn, Midsummer Night's Dream,
The Tempest, L'Allegro, The Way of All Flesh (not quite so
youthful, there), Moby Dick, The Earthly Paradise, St. Agnes'
Eve, The Idylls of the King, most of Swinburne, Pride and
Prejudice, Religio Medici, Vanity Fair.

Probably he was not so very different from President-Elect
Windrip in his rather uncritical reverence toward any book he had
heard of before he was thirty. . . . No American whose fathers
have lived in the country for over two generations is so utterly
different from any other American.

In one thing, Doremus's literary escapism failed him
thoroughly. He tried to relearn Latin, but he could not now,
uncajoled by a master, believe that "Mensa, mensae, mensae,
mensam, mensa"--all that idiotic A table, of a table, to a table,
toward a table, at in by or on a table--could bear him again as
once it had to the honey-sweet tranquillity of Vergil and the
Sabine Farm.

Then he saw that in everything his quest failed him.

The reading was good enough, toothsome, satisfying, except
that he felt guilty at having sneaked away to an Ivory Tower at
all. Too many years he had made a habit of social duty. He wanted
to be "in" things, and he was daily more irritable as Windrip
began, even before his inauguration, to dictate to the
country.

Buzz's party, with the desertions to the Jeffersonians, had
less than a majority in Congress. "Inside dope" came to Doremus
from Washington that Windrip was trying to buy, to flatter, to
blackmail opposing Congressmen. A President-Elect has unhallowed
power, if he so wishes, and Windrip--no doubt with promises of
abnormal favors in the way of patronage--won over a few. Five
Jeffersonian Congressmen had their elections challenged. One
sensationally disappeared, and smoking after his galloping heels
there was a devilish fume of embezzlements. And with each such
triumph of Windrip, all the well-meaning, cloistered Doremuses of
the country were the more anxious.

All through the "Depression," ever since 1929, Doremus had
felt the insecurity, the confusion, the sense of futility in
trying to do anything more permanent than shaving or eating
breakfast, that was general to the country. He could no longer
plan, for himself or for his dependants, as the citizens of this
once unsettled country had planned since 1620.

Why, their whole lives had been predicated on the privilege of
planning. Depressions had been only cyclic storms, certain to end
in sunshine; Capitalism and parliamentary government were
eternal, and eternally being improved by the honest votes of Good
Citizens.

Doremus's grandfather, Calvin, Civil War veteran and ill-paid,
illiberal Congregational minister, had yet planned, "My son,
Loren, shall have a theological education, and I think we shall
be able to build a fine new house in fifteen or twenty years."
That had given him a reason for working, and a goal.

His father, Loren, had vowed, "Even if I have to economize on
books a little, and perhaps give up this extravagance of eating
meat four times a week--very bad for the digestion, anyway--my
son, Doremus, shall have a college education, and when, as he
desires, he becomes a publicist, I think perhaps I shall be able
to help him for a year or two. And then I hope--oh, in a mere
five or six years more--to buy that complete Dickens with all the
illustrations--oh, an extravagance, but a thing to leave to my
grandchildren to treasure forever!"

But Doremus Jessup could not plan, "I'll have Sissy go to
Smith before she studies architecture," or "If Julian Falck and
Sissy get married and stick here in the Fort, I'll give 'em the
southwest lot and some day, maybe fifteen years from now, the
whole place will be filled with nice kids again!" No. Fifteen
years from now, he sighed, Sissy might be hustling hash for the
sort of workers who called the waiter's art "hustling hash"; and
Julian might be in a concentration camp--Fascist or
Communist!

The Horatio Alger tradition, from rags to Rockefellers, was
clean gone out of the America it had dominated.

It seemed faintly silly to hope, to try to prophesy, to give
up sleep on a good mattress for toil on a typewriter, and as for
saving money--idiotic!

And for a newspaper editor--for one who must know, at least as
well as the Encyclopædia, everything about local and
foreign history, geography, economics, politics, literature, and
methods of playing football--it was maddening that it seemed
impossible now to know anything surely.

"He don't know what it's all about" had in a year or two
changed from a colloquial sneer to a sound general statement
regarding almost any economist. Once, modestly enough, Doremus
had assumed that he had a decent knowledge of finance, taxation,
the gold standard, agricultural exports, and he had smilingly
pontificated everywhere that Liberal Capitalism would pastorally
lead into State Socialism, with governmental ownership of mines
and railroads and water-power so settling all inequalities of
income that every lion of a structural steel worker would be
willing to lie down with any lamb of a contractor, and all the
jails and tuberculosis sanatoria would be clean empty.

Now he knew that he knew nothing fundamental and, like a lone
monk stricken with a conviction of sin, he mourned, "If I only
knew more! . . . Yes, and if I could only remember
statistics!"

The coming and the going of the N.R.A., the F.E.R.A., the
P.W.A., and all the rest, had convinced Doremus that there were
four sets of people who did not clearly understand anything
whatever about how the government must be conducted: all the
authorities in Washington; all of the citizenry who talked or
wrote profusely about politics; the bewildered untouchables who
said nothing; and Doremus Jessup.

"But," said he, "now, after Buzz's inauguration, everything is
going to be completely simple and comprehensible again--the
country is going to be run as his private domain!"

Julian Falck, now sophomore in Amherst, had come home for
Christmas vacation, and he dropped in at the Informer
office to beg from Doremus a ride home before dinner.

He called Doremus "sir" and did not seem to think he was a
comic fossil. Doremus liked it.

On the way they stopped for gasoline at the garage of John
Pollikop, the seething Social Democrat, and were waited upon by
Karl Pascal--sometime donkey-engine-man at Tasbrough's quarry,
sometime strike leader, sometime political prisoner in the county
jail on a thin charge of inciting to riot, and ever since then, a
model of Communistic piety.

Pascal was a thin man, but sinewy; his gaunt and humorous face
of a good mechanic was so grease-darkened that the skin above and
below his eyes seemed white as a fish-belly, and, in turn, that
pallid rim made his eyes, alert dark gipsy eyes, seem the larger.
. . . A panther chained to a coal cart.

"Well, what you going to do after this election?" said
Doremus. "Oh! That's a fool question! I guess none of us chronic
kickers want to say much about what we plan to do after January,
when Buzz gets his hands on us. Lie low, eh?"

"I'm going to lie the lowest lie that I ever did. You bet! But
maybe there'll be a few Communist cells around here now, when
Fascism begins to get into people's hair. Never did have much
success with my propaganda before, but now, you watch!" exulted
Pascal.

"Depressed? Why good Lord, Mr. Jessup, I thought you knew your
revolutionary tactics better than that, way you supported us in
the quarry strike--even if you are the perfect type of
small capitalist bourgeois! Depressed? Why, can't you see, if the
Communists had paid for it they couldn't have had anything more
elegant for our purposes than the election of a pro-plutocrat,
itching militarist dictator like Buzz Windrip! Look! He'll get
everybody plenty dissatisfied. But they can't do anything,
barehanded against the armed troops. Then he'll whoop it up for a
war, and so millions of people will have arms and food rations in
their hands--all ready for the revolution! Hurray for Buzz and
John Prang the Baptist!"

"Why don't you go and ask your friend Father Perefixe if he
believes in the Virgin?"

"But you seem to like America, and you don't seem so
fanatical, Karl. I remember when I was a kid of about ten and
you--I suppose you were about twenty-five or -six then--you used
to slide with us and whoop like hell, and you made me a
ski-stick."

"Sure I like America. Came here when I was two years old--I
was born in Germany--my folks weren't Heinies, though--my dad was
French and my mother a Hunkie from Serbia. (Guess that makes me a
hundred per cent American, all right!) I think we've got the Old
Country beat, lots of ways. Why, say, Julian, over there I'd have
to call you 'Mein Herr' or 'Your Excellency,' or some fool thing,
and you'd call me, 'I say-uh, Pascal!' and Mr. Jessup here, my
Lord, he'd be 'Commendatore' or 'Herr Doktor'! No, I like it
here. There's symptoms of possible future democracy.
But--but--what burns me up--it isn't that old soap-boxer's
chestnut about how one tenth of 1 per cent of the population at
the top have an aggregate income equal to 42 per cent at the
bottom. Figures like that are too astronomical. Don't mean a
thing in the world to a fellow with his eyes--and nose--down in a
transmission box--fellow that doesn't see the stars except after
9 P.M. on odd Wednesdays. But what burns me up is the fact that
even before this Depression, in what you folks called prosperous
times, 7 per cent of all the families in the country earned $500
a year or less--remember, those weren't the unemployed, on
relief; those were the guys that had the honor of still doing
honest labor.

"Five hundred dollars a year is ten dollars a week--and that
means one dirty little room for a family of four people! It means
$5.00 a week for all their food--eighteen cents per day per
person for food!--and even the lousiest prisons allow more than
that. And the magnificent remainder of $2.50 a week, that means
nine cents per day per person for clothes, insurance, carfares,
doctors' bills, dentists' bills, and for God's sake,
amusements--amusements!--and all the rest of the nine cents a day
they can fritter away on their Fords and autogiros and, when they
feel fagged, skipping across the pond on the Normandie!
Seven per cent of all the fortunate American families where the
old man has got a job!"

Julian was silent; then whispered, "You know--fellow gets
discussing economics in college--theoretically sympathetic--but
to see your own kids living on eighteen cents a day for grub--I
guess that would make a man pretty extremist!"

Doremus fretted, "But what percentage of forced labor in your
Russian lumber camps and Siberian prison mines are getting more
than that?"

"Haaa! That's all baloney! That's the old standard come-back
at every Communist--just like once, twenty years ago, the
muttonheads used to think they'd crushed any Socialist when they
snickered 'If all the money was divided up, inside five years the
hustlers would have all of it again.' Prob'ly there's some
standard coup de grace like that in Russia, to crush
anybody that defends America. Besides!" Karl Pascal glowed with
nationalistic fervor. "We Americans aren't like those dumb Russki
peasants! We'll do a whole lot better when we get
Communism!"

And on that, his employer, the expansive John Pollikop, a
woolly Scotch terrier of a man, returned to the garage. John was
an excellent friend of Doremus; had, indeed, been his bootlegger
all through Prohibition, personally running in his whisky from
Canada. He had been known, even in that singularly scrupulous
profession, as one of its most trustworthy practitioners. Now he
flowered into mid-European dialectics:

"Evenin', Mist' Jessup, evenin', Julian! Karl fill up y' tank
for you? You want t' watch that guy--he's likely to hold out a
gallon on you. He's one of these crazy dogs of Communists--they
all believe in Violence instead of Evolution and Legality.
Them--why say, if they hadn't been so crooked, if they'd joined
me and Norman Thomas and the other intelligent Socialists
in a United Front with Roosevelt and the Jeffersonians, why say,
we'd of licked the pants off Buzzard Windrip! Windrip and his
plans!"

("Buzzard" Windrip. That was good, Doremus reflected. He'd be
able to use it in the Informer!)

Pascal protested, "Not that Buzzard's personal plans and
ambitions have got much to do with it. Altogether too easy to
explain everything just blaming it on Windrip. Why don't you
read your Marx, John, instead of always gassing about him?
Why, Windrip's just something nasty that's been vomited up.
Plenty others still left fermenting in the stomach--quack
economists with every sort of economic ptomain! No, Buzz isn't
important--it's the sickness that made us throw him up that we've
got to attend to--the sickness of more than 30 per cent
permanently unemployed, and growing larger. Got to cure it!"

As Doremus, driving away, looked back at them, Pascal and
Pollikop were removing a flat tire together and quarreling
bitterly, quite happily.

Doremus's attic study had been to him a refuge from the tender
solicitudes of Emma and Mrs. Candy and his daughters, and all the
impulsive hand-shaking strangers who wanted the local editor to
start off their campaigns for the sale of life insurance or
gas-saving carburetors, for the Salvation Army or the Red Cross
or the Orphans' Home or the Anti-cancer Crusade, or the assorted
magazines which would enable to go through college young men who
at all cost should be kept out of college.

It was a refuge now from the considerably less tender
solicitudes of supporters of the President-Elect. On the pretense
of work, Doremus took to sneaking up there in mid-evening; and he
sat not in an easy chair but stiffly, at his desk, making crosses
and five-pointed stars and six-pointed stars and fancy delete
signs on sheets of yellow copy paper, while he sorely
meditated.

Thus, this evening, after the demands of Karl Pascal and John
Pollikop:

"'The Revolt against Civilization!'

"But there's the worst trouble of this whole cursed business
of analysis. When I get to defending Democracy against Communism
and Fascism and what-not, I sound just like the Lothrop
Stoddards--why, I sound almost like a Hearst editorial on how
some college has got to kick out a Dangerous Red instructor in
order to preserve our Democracy for the ideals of Jefferson and
Washington! Yet somehow, singing the same words, I have a notion
my tune is entirely different from Hearst's. I don't think
we've done very well with all the plowland and forest and
minerals and husky human stock we've had. What makes me sick
about Hearst and the D.A.R. is that if they are against
Communism, I have to be for it, and I don't want to be!

"Wastage of resources, so they're about gone--that's been the
American share in the revolt against Civilization.

"We can go back to the Dark Ages! The crust of learning
and good manners and tolerance is so thin! It would just take a
few thousand big shells and gas bombs to wipe out all the eager
young men, and all the libraries and historical archives and
patent offices, all the laboratories and art galleries, all the
castles and Periclean temples and Gothic cathedrals, all the
cooperative stores and motor factories--every storehouse of
learning. No inherent reason why Sissy's grandchildren--if
anybody's grandchildren will survive at all--shouldn't be living
in caves and heaving rocks at catamounts.

"And what's the solution of preventing this debacle? Plenty of
'em! The Communists have a patent Solution they know will work.
So have the Fascists, and the rigid American
Constitutionalists--who call themselves advocates of
Democracy, without any notion what the word ought to mean; and
the Monarchists--who are certain that if we could just resurrect
the Kaiser and the Czar and King Alfonso, everybody would be
loyal and happy again, and the banks would simply force credit on
small businessmen at 2 per cent. And all the preachers--they tell
you that they alone have the inspired Solution.

"Well, gentlemen, I have listened to all your Solutions, and I
now inform you that I, and I alone, except perhaps for Walt
Trowbridge and the ghost of Pareto, have the perfect, the
inevitable, the only Solution, and that is: There is no Solution!
There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!

"There never will be a time when there won't be a large
proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have,
and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes
showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest
better."

Doremus suspected that, with the most scientific state, it
would be impossible for iron deposits always to find themselves
at exactly the rate decided upon two years before by the National
Technocratic Minerals Commission, no matter how elevated and
fraternal and Utopian the principles of the commissioners.

His Solution, Doremus pointed out, was the only one that did
not flee before the thought that a thousand years from now human
beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake
and such clownish mishaps as slipping in bathtubs. It presumed
that mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow
weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch, intestines
vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous
until the age of virtue and senility. It seemed to him
unidealistically probable, for all the "contemporary furniture"
of the 1930's, that most people would continue, at least for a
few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables,
read books--no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes
might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write
with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two
hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930, in 1630. He
suspected that tornadoes, floods, droughts, lightning, and
mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidal tendency known
in the best of citizens when their sweethearts go dancing off
with other men.

And, most fatally and abysmally, his Solution guessed that men
of superior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be
called Comrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots, Little
Brothers of the Poor, or any other rosy name, would continue to
have more influence than slower-witted men, however worthy.

All the warring Solutions--except his, Doremus chuckled--were
ferociously propagated by the Fanatics, the "Nuts."

He recalled an article in which Neil Carothers asserted that
the "rabble-rousers" of America in the mid-'thirties had a long
and dishonorable ancestry of prophets who had felt called upon to
stir up the masses to save the world, and save it in the
prophets' own way, and do it right now, and most violently: Peter
the Hermit, the ragged, mad, and stinking monk who, to rescue the
(unidentified) tomb of the Savior from undefined "outrages by the
pagans," led out on the Crusades some hundreds of thousands of
European peasants, to die on the way of starvation, after
burning, raping, and murdering fellow peasants in foreign
villages all along the road.

There was John Ball who "in 1381 was a share-the-wealth
advocate; he preached equality of wealth, the abolition of class
distinctions, and what would now be called communism," and whose
follower, Wat Tyler, looted London, with the final gratifying
result that afterward Labor was by the frightened government more
oppressed than ever. And nearly three hundred years later,
Cromwell's methods of expounding the sweet winsomeness of Purity
and Liberty were shooting, slashing, clubbing, starving, and
burning people, and after him the workers paid for the spree of
bloody righteousness with blood.

Brooding about it, fishing in the muddy slew of recollection
which most Americans have in place of a clear pool of history,
Doremus was able to add other names of well-meaning
rabble-rousers:

Murat and Danton and Robespierre, who helped shift the control
of France from the moldy aristocrats to the stuffy,
centime-pinching shopkeepers. Lenin and Trotzky who gave to the
illiterate Russian peasants the privileges of punching a time
clock and of being as learned, gay, and dignified as the factory
hands in Detroit; and Lenin's man, Borodin, who extended this
boon to China. And that William Randolph Hearst who in 1898 was
the Lenin of Cuba and switched the mastery of the golden isle
from the cruel Spaniards to the peaceful, unarmed,
brotherly-loving Cuban politicians of today.

The American Moses, Dowie, and his theocracy at Zion City,
Illinois, where the only results of the direct leadership of
God--as directed and encouraged by Mr. Dowie and by his even more
spirited successor, Mr. Voliva--were that the holy denizens were
deprived of oysters and cigarettes and cursing, and died without
the aid of doctors instead of with it, and that the stretch of
road through Zion City incessantly caused the breakage of springs
on the cars of citizens from Evanston, Wilmette, and Winnetka,
which may or not have been a desirable Good Deed.

Cecil Rhodes, his vision of making South Africa a British
paradise, and the actuality of making it a graveyard for British
soldiers.

All the Utopias--Brook Farm, Robert Owen's sanctuary of
chatter, Upton Sinclair's Helicon Hall--and their regulation end
in scandal, feuds, poverty, griminess, disillusion.

All the leaders of Prohibition, so certain that their cause
was world-regenerating that for it they were willing to shoot
down violators.

It seemed to Doremus that the only rabble-rouser to build
permanently had been Brigham Young, with his bearded Mormon
captains, who not only turned the Utah desert into an Eden but
made it pay and kept it up.

Pondered Doremus: Blessed be they who are not Patriots and
Idealists, and who do not feel they must dash right in and Do
Something About It, something so immediately important that all
doubters must be liquidated--tortured--slaughtered! Good old
murder, that since the slaying of Abel by Cain has always been
the new device by which all oligarchies and dictators have, for
all future ages to come, removed opposition!

In this acid mood Doremus doubted the efficacy of all
revolutions; dared even a little to doubt our two American
revolutions--against England in 1776, and the Civil War.

For a New England editor to contemplate even the smallest
criticism of these wars was what it would have been for a
Southern Baptist fundamentalist preacher to question Immortality,
the Inspiration of the Bible, and the ethical value of shouting
Hallelujah. Yet had it, Doremus queried nervously, been necessary
to have four years of inconceivably murderous Civil War, followed
by twenty years of commercial oppression of the South, in order
to preserve the Union, free the slaves, and establish the
equality of Industry with Agriculture? Had it been just to the
Negroes themselves to throw them so suddenly, with so little
preparation, into full citizenship, that the Southern states, in
what they considered self-defense, disqualified them at the polls
and lynched them and lashed them? Could they not, as Lincoln at
first desired and planned, have been freed without the vote, then
gradually and competently educated, under federal guardianship,
so that by 1890 they might, without too much enmity, have been
able to enter fully into all the activities of the land?

A generation and a half (Doremus meditated) of the sturdiest
and most gallant killed or crippled in the Civil War or, perhaps
worst of all, becoming garrulous professional heroes and
satellites of the politicians who in return for their solid vote
made all lazy jobs safe for the G.A.R. The most valorous, it was
they who suffered the most, for while the John D. Rockefellers,
the J. P. Morgans, the Vanderbilts, Astors, Goulds, and all their
nimble financial comrades of the South, did not enlist, but
stayed in the warm, dry counting-house, drawing the fortune of
the country into their webs, it was Jeb Stuart, Stonewall
Jackson, Nathaniel Lyon, Pat Cleburne, and the knightly James B.
McPherson who were killed . . . and with them Abraham
Lincoln.

So, with the hundreds of thousands who should have been the
progenitors of new American generations drained away, we could
show the world, which from 1780 to 1860 had so admired men like
Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, the Adamses, Webster,
only such salvages as McKinley, Benjamin Harrison, William
Jennings Bryan, Harding . . . and Senator Berzelius Windrip and
his rivals.

Slavery had been a cancer, and in that day was known no remedy
save bloody cutting. There had been no X-rays of wisdom and
tolerance. Yet to sentimentalize this cutting, to justify and
rejoice in it, was an altogether evil thing, a national
superstition that was later to lead to other Unavoidable
Wars--wars to free Cubans, to free Filipinos who didn't want our
brand of freedom, to End All Wars.

Let us, thought Doremus, not throb again to the bugles of the
Civil War, nor find diverting the gallantry of Sherman's dashing
Yankee boys in burning the houses of lone women, nor particularly
admire the calmness of General Lee as he watched thousands writhe
in the mud.

He even wondered if, necessarily, it had been such a desirable
thing for the Thirteen Colonies to have cut themselves off from
Great Britain. Had the United States remained in the British
Empire, possibly there would have evolved a confederation that
could have enforced World Peace, instead of talking about it.
Boys and girls from Western ranches and Southern plantations and
Northern maple groves might have added Oxford and York Minster
and Devonshire villages to their own domain. Englishmen, and even
virtuous Englishwomen, might have learned that persons who lack
the accent of a Kentish rectory or of a Yorkshire textile village
may yet in many ways be literate; and that astonishing numbers of
persons in the world cannot be persuaded that their chief aim in
life ought to be to increase British exports on behalf of the
stock-holdings of the Better Classes.

It is commonly asserted, Doremus remembered, that without
complete political independence the United States could not have
developed its own peculiar virtues. Yet it was not apparent to
him that America was any more individual than Canada or
Australia; that Pittsburgh and Kansas City were to be preferred
before Montreal and Melbourne, Sydney and Vancouver.

No questioning of the eventual wisdom of the "radicals" who
had first advocated these two American revolutions, Doremus
warned himself, should be allowed to give any comfort to that
eternal enemy: the conservative manipulators of privilege who
damn as "dangerous agitators" any man who menaces their fortunes;
who jump in their chairs at the sting of a gnat like Debs, and
blandly swallow a camel like Windrip.

Between the rabble-rousers--chiefly to be detected by desire
for their own personal power and notoriety--and the
un-self-seeking fighters against tyranny, between William Walker
or Danton, and John Howard or William Lloyd Garrison, Doremus
saw, there was the difference between a noisy gang of thieves and
an honest man noisily defending himself against thieves. He had
been brought up to revere the Abolitionists: Lovejoy, Garrison,
Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe--though his father had
considered John Brown insane and a menace, and had thrown sly mud
at the marble statues of Henry Ward Beecher, the apostle in the
fancy vest. And Doremus could not do otherwise than revere the
Abolitionists now, though he wondered a little if Stephen Douglas
and Thaddeus Stephens and Lincoln, more cautious and less
romantic men, might not have done the job better.

"Is it just possible," he sighed, "that the most vigorous and
boldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress
instead of its greatest creators? Possible that plain men with
the humble trait of minding their own business will rank higher
in the heavenly hierarchy than all the plumed souls who have
shoved their way in among the masses and insisted on saving
them?"

14

I joined the Christian, or as some call it, the Campbellite
Church as a mere boy, not yet dry behind the ears. But I wished
then and I wish now that it were possible for me to belong to the
whole glorious brotherhood; to be one in Communion at the same
time with the brave Presbyterians that fight the pusillanimous,
mendacious, destructive, tom-fool Higher Critics, so-called; and
with the Methodists who so strongly oppose war yet in war-time
can always be counted upon for Patriotism to the limit; and with
the splendidly tolerant Baptists, the earnest Seventh-Day
Adventists, and I guess I could even say a kind word for the
Unitarians, as that great executive William Howard Taft belonged
to them, also his wife.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

Officially, Doremus belonged to the Universalist Church, his
wife and children to the Episcopal--a natural American
transition. He had been reared to admire Hosea Ballou, the
Universalist St. Augustine who, from his tiny parsonage in
Barnard, Vermont, had proclaimed his faith that even the
wickedest would have, after earthly death, another chance of
salvation. But now, Doremus could scarce enter the Fort Beulah
Universalist Church. It had too many memories of his father, the
pastor, and it was depressing to see how the old-time
congregations, in which two hundred thick beards would wag in the
grained pine benches every Sunday morning, and their womenfolks
and children line up beside the patriarchs, had dwindled to aged
widows and farmers and a few schoolteachers.

But in this time of seeking, Doremus did venture there. The
church was a squat and gloomy building of granite, not
particularly enlivened by the arches of colored slate above the
windows, yet as a boy Doremus had thought it and its sawed-off
tower the superior of Chartres. He had loved it as in Isaiah
College he had loved the Library which, for all its appearance of
being a crouching red-brick toad, had meant to him freedom for
spiritual discovery--still cavern of a reading room where for
hours one could forget the world and never be nagged away to
supper.

He found, on his one attendance at the Universalist church, a
scattering of thirty disciples, being addressed by a "supply," a
theological student from Boston, monotonously shouting his
well-meant, frightened, and slightly plagiaristic eloquence in
regard to the sickness of Abijah, the son of Jeroboam. Doremus
looked at the church walls, painted a hard and glistening green,
unornamented, to avoid all the sinful trappings of papistry,
while he listened to the preacher's hesitant droning:

"Now, uh, now what so many of us fail to realize is how, uh,
how sin, how any sin that we, uh, we ourselves may commit, any
sin reflects not on ourselves but on those that we, uh, that we
hold near and dear--"

He would have given anything, Doremus yearned, for a sermon
which, however irrational, would passionately lift him to renewed
courage, which would bathe him in consolation these beleagured
months. But with a shock of anger he saw that that was exactly
what he had been condemning just a few days ago: the irrational
dramatic power of the crusading leader, clerical or
political.

Very well then--sadly. He'd just have to get along without the
spiritual consolation of the church that he had known in college
days.

In the cozy Anglicanism of St. Crispin's P. E. Church, with
its imitation English memorial brasses and imitation Celtic font
and brass-eagle reading desk and dusty-smelling maroon carpet,
Doremus listened to Mr. Falck: "Almighty God, the Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ, who desireth not the death of a sinner, but
rather that he may turn from his wickedness, and live; and hath
given power and commandment to his Ministers, to declare and
pronounce to his people, being penitent, the Absolution and
Remission of their sins--"

Doremus glanced at the placidly pious façade of his
wife, Emma. The lovely, familiar old ritual seemed meaningless to
him now, with no more pertinence to a life menaced by Buzz
Windrip and his Minute Men, no more comfort for having lost his
old deep pride in being an American, than a stage revival of an
equally lovely and familiar Elizabethan play. He looked about
nervously. However exalted Mr. Falck himself might be, most of
the congregation were Yorkshire pudding. The Anglican Church was,
to them, not the aspiring humility of Newman nor the humanity of
Bishop Brown (both of whom left it!) but the sign and proof of
prosperity--an ecclesiastical version of owning a twelve-cylinder
Cadillac--or even more, of knowing that one's grandfather owned
his own surrey and a respectable old family horse.

The whole place smelled to Doremus of stale muffins. Mrs. R.
C. Crowley was wearing white gloves and on her bust--for a Mrs.
Crowley, even in 1936, did not yet have breasts--was a tight
bouquet of tuberoses. Francis Tasbrough had a morning coat and
striped trousers and on the lilac-colored pew cushion beside him
was (unique in Fort Beulah) a silk top-hat. And even the wife of
Doremus's bosom, or at least of his breakfast coffee, the good
Emma, had a pedantic expression of superior goodness which
irritated him.

"Whole outfit stifles me!" he snapped. "Rather be at a
yelling, jumping Holy Roller orgy--no--that's Buzz Windrip's kind
of jungle hysterics. I want a church, if there can possibly be
one, that's advanced beyond the jungle and beyond the chaplains
of King Henry the Eighth. I know why, even though she's painfully
conscientious, Lorinda never goes to church."

Lorinda Pike, on that sleety December afternoon, was darning a
tea cloth in the lounge of her Beulah Valley Tavern, five miles
up the river from the Fort. It wasn't, of course, a tavern: it
was a super-boarding-house as regards its twelve guest bedrooms,
and a slightly too arty tearoom in its dining facilities. Despite
his long affection for Lorinda, Doremus was always annoyed by the
Singhalese brass finger bowls, the North Carolina table mats, and
the Italian ash trays displayed for sale on wabbly card tables in
the dining room. But he had to admit that the tea was excellent,
the scones light, the Stilton sound, Lorinda's private rum
punches admirable, and that Lorinda herself was intelligent yet
adorable--particularly when, as on this gray afternoon, she was
bothered neither by other guests nor by the presence of that
worm, her partner, Mr. Nipper, whose pleasing notion it was that
because he had invested a few thousand in the Tavern he should
have none of the work or responsibility and half the profits.

Doremus thrust his way in, patting off the snow, puffing to
recover from the shakiness caused by skidding all the way from
Fort Beulah. Lorinda nodded carelessly, dropped another stick on
the fireplace, and went back to her darning with nothing more
intimate than "Hullo. Nasty out."

"Yuh--fierce."

But as they sat on either side the hearth their eyes had no
need of smiling for a bridge between them.

Lorinda reflected, "Well, my darling, it's going to be pretty
bad. I guess Windrip & Co. will put the woman's struggle
right back in the sixteen-hundreds, with Anne Hutchinson and the
Antinomians."

"Sure. Back to the kitchen."

"Even if you haven't got one!"

"Any worse than us men? Notice that Windrip never
mentioned free speech and the freedom of the press in his
articles of faith? Oh, he'd 've come out for 'em strong and
hearty if he'd even thought of 'em!"

"That's so. Tea, darling?"

"No. Linda, damn it, I feel like taking the family and
sneaking off to Canada before I get nabbed--right after
Buzz's inauguration."

"No. You mustn't. We've got to keep all the newspapermen
that'll go on fighting him, and not go sniffling up to the
garbage pail. Besides! What would I do without you?" For the
first time Lorinda sounded importunate.

"You'll be a lot less suspect if I'm not around. But I guess
you're right. I can't go till they put the skids under me. Then
I'll have to vanish. I'm too old to stand jail."

"Not too old to make love, I hope! That would be hard
on a girl!"

"Nobody ever is, except the kind that used to be too young to
make love! Anyway, I'll stay--for a while."

He had, suddenly, from Lorinda, the resoluteness he had sought
in church. He would go on trying to sweep back the ocean, just
for his own satisfaction. It meant, however, that his hermitage
in the Ivory Tower was closed with slightly ludicrous speed. But
he felt strong again, and happy. His brooding was interrupted by
Lorinda's curt:

"How's Emma taking the political situation?"

"Doesn't know there is one! Hears me croaking, and she heard
Walt Trowbridge's warning on the radio, last evening--did you
listen in?--and she says, 'Oh my, how dreadful!' and then forgets
all about it and worries about the saucepan that got burnt! She's
lucky! Oh well, she probably calms me down and keeps me from
becoming a complete neurote! Probably that's why I'm so
darned everlastingly fond of her. And yet I'm chump enough to
wish you and I were together--uh--recognizedly together, all the
time--and could fight together to keep some little light burning
in this coming new glacial epoch. I do. All the time. I think
that, at this moment, all things considered, I should like to
kiss you."

"Is that so unusual a celebration?"

"Yes. Always. Always it's the first time again! Look, Linda,
do you ever stop to think how curious it is, that
with--everything between us--like that night in the hotel at
Montreal--we neither one of us seem to feel any guilt, any
embarrassment--can sit and gossip like this?"

"No, dear. . . . Darling! . . . It doesn't seem a bit curious.
It was all so natural. So good!"

"And yet we're reasonably responsible people--"

"Of course. That's why nobody suspects us, not even Emma.
Thank God she doesn't, Doremus! I wouldn't hurt her for anything,
not even for your kind-hearted favors!"

"Beast!"

"Oh, you might be suspected, all by yourself. It's known that
you sometimes drink likker and play poker and tell 'hot ones.'
But who'd ever suspect that the local female crank, the
suffragist, the pacifist, the anti-censorshipist, the friend of
Jane Addams and Mother Bloor, could be a libertine! Highbrows!
Bloodless reformers! Oh, and I've known so many women agitators,
all dressed in Carrie Nation hatchets and modest sheets of
statistics, that have been ten times as passionate, intolerably
passionate, as any cream-faced plump little Kept Wife in chiffon
step-ins!"

For a moment their embracing eyes were not merely friendly and
accustomed and careless.

He fretted, "Oh I think of you all the time and want you and
yet I think of Emma too--and I don't even have the fine
novelistic egotism of feeling guilty and intolerably caught in
complexities. Yes, it does all seem so natural, Dear Linda!"

He stalked restlessly to the casement window, looking back at
her every second step. It was dusk now, and the roads smoking. He
stared out inattentively--then very attentively indeed.

"That's curious. Curiouser and curiouser. Standing back behind
that big bush, lilac bush I guess it is, across the road, there's
a fellow watching this place. I can see him in the headlights
whenever a car comes along. And I think it's my hired man, Oscar
Ledue--Shad." He started to draw the cheerful red-and-white
curtains.

"No! No! Don't draw them! He'll get suspicious."

"That's right. Funny, his watching there--if it is him.
He's supposed to be at my house right now, looking after the
furnace--winters, he only works for me couple of hours a day,
works in the sash factory, rest of the time, but he ought to--A
little light blackmail, I suppose. Well, he can publish
everything he saw today, wherever he wants to!"

And he was proud, yet all the while he was remembering the
warning in red chalk that he had found on his front porch after
the election. Before he had time to become very complicated about
it, the door vociferously banged open, and his daughter, Sissy,
sailed in.

As he marched out of the door, marched belligerently across
the road, in Doremus seethed all the agitated anger he had been
concealing from Sissy. And part hidden behind bushes, leaning on
his motorcycle, he did find Shad Ledue.

Shad was startled; for once he looked less contemptuously
masterful than a Fifth Avenue traffic policeman, as Doremus
snapped, "What you doing there?" and he stumbled in answering:
"Oh I just--something happened to my motor-bike."

"So! You ought to be home tending the furnace, Shad."

"Well, I guess I got my machine fixed now. I'll hike
along."

"No. My daughter is to drive me home, so you can put your
motorcycle in the back of my car and drive it back." (Somehow, he
had to talk privately to Sissy, though he was not in the least
certain what it was he had to say.)

"Her? Rats! Sissy can't drive for sour apples! Crazy's a
loon!"

"Ledue! Miss Sissy is a highly competent driver. At least she
satisfies me, and if you really feel she doesn't quite satisfy
your standard--"

"Her driving don't make a damn bit of difference to me one way
or th' other! G'-night!"

Recrossing the road, Doremus rebuked himself, "That was
childish of me. Trying to talk to him like a gent! But how I
would enjoy murdering him!"

He informed Sissy, at the door, "Shad happened to come
along--motorcycle in bad shape--let him take my Chrysler--I'll
drive with you."

"Fine! Only six boys have had their hair turn gray, driving
with me, this week."

"All right, dearest Father," said Sissy with an impishness
which reduced his knees to feebleness.

He assured himself, though, that this flip manner of Sissy,
characteristic of even the provincial boys and girls who had been
nursed on gasoline, was only an imitation of the nicer New York
harlots and would not last more than another year or two. Perhaps
this rattle-tongued generation needed a Buzz Windrip Revolution
and all its pain.

"Beautiful, I know it's swell to drive carefully, but do you
have to emulate the prudent snail?" said Sissy.

"Snails don't skid."

"No, they get run over. Rather skid!"

"So your father's a fossil!"

"Oh, I wouldn't--"

"Well, maybe he is, at that. There's advantages. Anyway: I
wonder if there isn't a lot of bunk about Age being so cautious
and conservative, and Youth always being so adventurous and bold
and original? Look at the young Nazis and how they enjoy beating
up the Communists. Look at almost any college class--the students
disapproving of the instructor because he's iconoclastic and
ridicules the sacred home-town ideas. Just this afternoon, I was
thinking, driving out here--"

"Listen, Dad, do you go to Lindy's often?"

"Why--why, not especially. Why?"

"Why don't you--What are you two so scared of? You two
wild-haired reformers--you and Lindy belong together. Why don't
you--you know--kind of be lovers?"

"Good God Almighty! Cecilia! I've never heard a decent
girl talk that way in all my life!"

"Is it? Well, maybe. Unusual to suggest it--aloud. But I
wonder if lots of young females don't sometimes kind of
think it, just the same, when they see the Venerable
Parent going stale!"

"Sissy--"

"Hey, watch that telephone pole!"

"Hang it, I didn't go anywheres near it! Now you look here,
Sissy: you simply must not be so froward--or forward, whichever
it is; I always get those two words balled up. This is serious
business. I've never heard of such a preposterous suggestion as
Linda--Lorinda and I being lovers. My dear child, you simply
can't be flip about such final things as that!"

"Oh, can't I! Oh, sorry, Dad. I just mean--About Mother
Emma. Course I wouldn't have anybody hurt her, not even Lindy and
you. But, why, bless you, Venerable, she'd never even dream of
such a thing. You could have your nice pie and she'd never miss
one single slice. Mother's mental grooves aren't, uh, well, they
aren't so very sex-conditioned, if that's how you say it--more
sort of along the new-vacuum-cleaner complex, if you know what I
mean--page Freud! Oh, she's swell, but not so analytical
and--"

"Are those your ethics, then?"

"Huh? Well for cat's sake, why not? Have a swell time that'll
get you full of beans again and yet not hurt anybody's feelings?
Why, say, that's the entire second chapter in my book on
ethics!"

"Sissy! Have you, by any chance, any vaguest notion of what
you're talking about, or think you're talking about? Of
course--and perhaps we ought to be ashamed of our cowardly
negligence--but I, and I don't suppose your mother, have taught
you so very much about 'sex' and--"

"Thank heaven! You spared me the dear little flower and its
simply shocking affair with that tough tomcat of a tiger lily in
the next bed--excuse me--I mean in the next plot. I'm so glad you
did. Pete's sake! I'd certainly hate to blush every time I looked
at a garden!"

"Sissy! Child! Please! You mustn't be so beastly cute!
These are all weighty things--"

Penitently: "I know, Dad. I'm sorry. It's just--if you only
knew how wretched I feel when I see you so wretched and so quiet
and everything. This horrible Windrip, League of Forgodsakers
business has got you down, hasn't it! If you're going to fight
'em, you've got to get some pep back into you--you've got to take
off the lace mitts and put on the brass knuckles--and I got kind
of a hunch Lorinda might do that for you, and only her. Heh! Her
pretending to be so high-minded! (Remember that old wheeze Buck
Titus used to love so--'If you're saving the fallen women, save
me one'? Oh, not so good. I guess we'll take that line right out
of the sketch!) But anyway, our Lindy has a pretty moist and
hungry eye--"

"Impossible! Impossible! By the way, Sissy! What do you know
about all of this? Are you a virgin?"

"Dad! Is that your idea of a question to--Oh, I guess I was
asking for it. And the answer is: Yes. So far. But not promising
one single thing about the future. Let me tell you right now, if
conditions in this country do get as bad as you've been claiming
they will, and Julian Falck is threatened with having to go to
war or go to prison or some rotten thing like that, I'm most
certainly not going to let any maidenly modesty interfere between
me and him, and you might just as well be prepared for that!"

"It is Julian then, not Malcolm?"

"Oh, I think so. Malcolm gives me a pain in the neck. He's
getting all ready to take his proper place as a colonel or
something with Windrip's wooden soldiers. And I am so fond of
Julian! Even if he is the doggonedest, most impractical
soul--like his grandfather--or you! He's a sweet thing. We sat up
purring pretty nothings till about two, last night, I guess."

"Dear quaint old word! As if anything could be so awfully much
more familiar than a good, capable, 10,000 h.p. kiss! But
darling, just so you won't worry--no. The few times, late nights,
in our sitting room, when I've slept with Julian--well, we've
slept!"

"Now you listen to me! And this is something you ought to be
telling me, not me you, Mr. Jessup! Looks as if this country, and
most of the world--I am being serious, now, Dad; plenty
serious, God help us all!--it looks as if we're headed right back
into barbarism. It's war! There's not going to be much time for
coyness and modesty, any more than there is for a base-hospital
nurse when they bring in the wounded. Nice young ladies--they're
out! It's Lorinda and me that you men are going to want to
have around, isn't it--isn't it--now isn't it?"

"Maybe--perhaps," Doremus sighed, depressed at seeing a little
more of his familiar world slide from under his feet as the flood
rose.

They were coming into the Jessup driveway. Shad Ledue was just
leaving the garage.

"Skip in the house, quick, will you!" said Doremus to his
girl.

"Sure. But do be careful, hon!" She no longer sounded like his
little daughter, to be protected, adorned with pale blue ribbons,
slyly laughed at when she tried to show off in grown-up ways. She
was suddenly a dependable comrade, like Lorinda.

Doremus slipped resolutely out of his car and said calmly:

"Shad!"

"Yuh?"

"D'you take the car keys into the kitchen?"

"Huh? No. I guess I left 'em in the car."

"I've told you a hundred times they belong inside."

"Yuh? Well, how'd you like Miss Cecilia's driving? Have
a good visit with old Mrs. Pike?"

He was derisive now, beyond concealment.

"Ledue, I rather think you're fired--right now!"

"Well! Just feature that! O.K., Chief! I was just going to
tell you that we're forming a second chapter of the League of
Forgotten Men in the Fort, and I'm to be the secretary. They
don't pay much--only about twice what you pay me--pretty
tight-fisted--but it'll mean something in politics.
Good-night!"

Afterward, Doremus was sorry to remember that, for all his
longshoreman clumsiness, Shad had learned a precise script in his
red Vermont schoolhouse, and enough mastery of figures so that
probably he would be able to keep this rather bogus
secretaryship. Too bad!

When, as League secretary, a fortnight later, Shad wrote to
him demanding a donation of two hundred dollars to the League,
and Doremus refused, the Informer began to lose
circulation within twenty-four hours.

15

Usually I'm pretty mild, in fact many of my friends are kind
enough to call it "Folksy," when I'm writing or speechifying. My
ambition is to "live by the side of the road and be a friend to
man." But I hope that none of the gentlemen who have honored me
with their enmity think for one single moment that when I run
into a gross enough public evil or a persistent enough detractor,
I can't get up on my hind legs and make a sound like a two-tailed
grizzly in April. So right at the start of this account of my
ten-year fight with them, as private citizen, State Senator, and
U. S. Senator, let me say that the Sangfrey River Light, Power,
and Fuel Corporation are--and I invite a suit for libel--the
meanest, lowest, cowardliest gang of yellow-livered,
back-slapping, hypocritical gun-toters, bomb-throwers,
ballot-stealers, ledger-fakers, givers of bribes, suborners of
perjury, scab-hirers, and general lowdown crooks, liars, and
swindlers that ever tried to do an honest servant of the People
out of an election--not but what I have always succeeded in
licking them, so that my indignation at these homicidal
kleptomaniacs is not personal but entirely on behalf of the
general public.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

On Wednesday, January 6, 1937, just a fortnight before his
inauguration, President-Elect Windrip announced his appointments
of cabinet members and of diplomats.

Secretary of State: his former secretary and press-agent, Lee
Sarason, who also took the position of High Marshal, or
Commander-in-Chief, of the Minute Men, which organization was to
be established permanently, as an innocent marching club.

Secretary of the Treasury: one Webster R. Skittle, president
of the prosperous Fur & Hide National Bank of St. Louis--Mr.
Skittle had once been indicted on a charge of defrauding the
government on his income tax, but he had been acquitted, more or
less, and during the campaign, he was said to have taken a
convincing way of showing his faith in Buzz Windrip as the Savior
of the Forgotten Men.

Secretary of War: Colonel Osceola Luthorne, formerly editor of
the Topeka (Kans.) Argus, and the Fancy Goods and
Novelties Gazette; more recently high in real estate. His
title came from his position on the honorary staff of the
Governor of Tennessee. He had long been a friend and fellow
campaigner of Windrip.

It was a universal regret that Bishop Paul Peter Prang should
have refused the appointment as Secretary of War, with a letter
in which he called Windrip "My dear Friend and Collaborator" and
asserted that he had actually meant it when he had said he
desired no office. Later, it was a similar regret when Father
Coughlin refused the Ambassadorship to Mexico, with no letter at
all but only a telegram cryptically stating, "Just six months too
late."

A new cabinet position, that of Secretary of Education and
Public Relations, was created. Not for months would Congress
investigate the legality of such a creation, but meantime the new
post was brilliantly held by Hector Macgoblin, M.D., Ph.D., Hon.
Litt.D.

Senator Porkwood graced the position of Attorney General, and
all the other offices were acceptably filled by men who, though
they had roundly supported Windrip's almost socialistic projects
for the distribution of excessive fortunes, were yet known to be
thoroughly sensible men, and no fanatics.

It was said, though Doremus Jessup could never prove it, that
Windrip learned from Lee Sarason the Spanish custom of getting
rid of embarrassing friends and enemies by appointing them to
posts abroad, preferably quite far abroad. Anyway, as Ambassador
to Brazil, Windrip appointed Herbert Hoover, who not very
enthusiastically accepted; as Ambassador to Germany, Senator
Borah; as Governor of the Philippines, Senator Robert La
Follette, who refused; and as Ambassadors to the Court of St.
James's, France, and Russia, none other than Upton Sinclair, Milo
Reno, and Senator Bilbo of Mississippi.

These three had a fine time. Mr. Sinclair pleased the British
by taking so friendly an interest in their politics that he
openly campaigned for the Independent Labor Party and issued a
lively brochure called "I, Upton Sinclair, Prove That
Prime-Minister Walter Elliot, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and
First Lord of the Admiralty Nancy Astor Are All Liars and Have
Refused to Accept My Freely Offered Advice." Mr. Sinclair also
aroused considerable interest in British domestic circles by
advocating an act of Parliament forbidding the wearing of evening
clothes and all hunting of foxes except with shotguns; and on the
occasion of his official reception at Buckingham Palace, he
warmly invited King George and Queen Mary to come and live in
California.

Mr. Milo Reno, insurance salesman and former president of the
National Farm Holiday Association, whom all the French royalists
compared to his great predecessor, Benjamin Franklin, for
forthrightness, became the greatest social favorite in the
international circles of Paris, the
Basses-Pyrénées, and the Riviera, and was once
photographed playing tennis at Antibes with the Duc de Tropez,
Lord Rothermere, and Dr. Rudolph Hess.

Senator Bilbo had, possibly, the best time of all.

Stalin asked his advice, as based on his ripe experience in
the Gleichshaltung of Mississippi, about the cultural
organization of the somewhat backward natives of Tadjikistan, and
so valuable did it prove that Excellency Bilbo was invited to
review the Moscow military celebration, the following November
seventh, in the same stand with the very highest class of
representatives of the classless state. It was a triumph for His
Excellency. Generalissimo Voroshilov fainted after 200,000 Soviet
troops, 7000 tanks, and 9000 aeroplanes had passed by; Stalin had
to be carried home after reviewing 317,000; but Ambassador Bilbo
was there in the stand when the very last of the 626,000 soldiers
had gone by, all of them saluting him under the quite erroneous
impression that he was the Chinese Ambassador; and he was still
tirelessly returning their salutes, fourteen to the minute, and
softly singing with them the "International."

He was less of a hit later, however, when to the unsmiling
Anglo-American Association of Exiles to Soviet Russia from
Imperialism, he sang to the tune of the "International" what he
regarded as amusing private words of his own:

"Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, From Russia make your getaway.They all are rich in Bilbo's nation. God bless the U. S. A.!"

Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, after her spirited campaign for
Mr. Windrip, was publicly angry that she was offered no position
higher than a post in the customs office in Nome, Alaska, though
this was offered to her very urgently indeed. She had demanded
that there be created, especially for her, the cabinet position
of Secretaryess of Domestic Science, Child Welfare, and
Anti-Vice. She threatened to turn Jeffersonian, Republican, or
Communistic, but in April she was heard of in Hollywood, writing
the scenario for a giant picture to be called, They Did It in
Greece.

As an insult and boy-from-home joke, the President-Elect
appointed Franklin D. Roosevelt minister to Liberia. Mr.
Roosevelt's opponents laughed very much, and opposition
newspapers did cartoons of him sitting unhappily in a grass hut
with a sign on which "N.R.A." had been crossed out and "U.S.A."
substituted. But Mr. Roosevelt declined with so amiable a smile
that the joke seemed rather to have slipped.

The followers of President Windrip trumpeted that it was
significant that he should be the first president inaugurated not
on March fourth, but on January twentieth, according to the
provision of the new Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution. It
was a sign straight from Heaven (though, actually, Heaven had not
been the author of the amendment, but Senator George W. Norris of
Nebraska), and proved that Windrip was starting a new paradise on
earth.

The inauguration was turbulent. President Roosevelt declined
to be present--he politely suggested that he was about half ill
unto death, but that same noon he was seen in a New York shop,
buying books on gardening and looking abnormally cheerful.

More than a thousand reporters, photographers, and radio men
covered the inauguration. Twenty-seven constituents of Senator
Porkwood, of all sexes, had to sleep on the floor of the
Senator's office, and a hall-bedroom in the suburb of Bladensburg
rented for thirty dollars for two nights. The presidents of
Brazil, the Argentine, and Chile flew to the inauguration in a
Pan-American aeroplane, and Japan sent seven hundred students on
a special train from Seattle.

A motor company in Detroit had presented to Windrip a
limousine with armor plate, bulletproof glass, a hidden
nickel-steel safe for papers, a concealed private bar, and
upholstery made from the Troissant tapestries of 1670. But Buzz
chose to drive from his home to the Capitol in his old Hupmobile
sedan, and his driver was a youngster from his home town whose
notion of a uniform for state occasions was a blue-serge suit,
red tie, and derby hat. Windrip himself did wear a topper, but he
saw to it that Lee Sarason saw to it that the one hundred and
thirty million plain citizens learned, by radio, even while the
inaugural parade was going on, that he had borrowed the topper
for this one sole occasion from a New York Republican
Representative who had ancestors.

But following Windrip was an un-Jacksonian escort of soldiers:
the American Legion and, immensely grander than the others, the
Minute Men, wearing trench helmets of polished silver and led by
Colonel Dewey Haik in scarlet tunic and yellow riding-breeches
and helmet with golden plumes.

Solemnly, for once looking a little awed, a little like a
small-town boy on Broadway, Windrip took the oath, administered
by the Chief Justice (who disliked him very much indeed) and,
edging even closer to the microphone, squawked, "My fellow
citizens, as the President of the United States of America, I
want to inform you that the real New Deal has started
right this minute, and we're all going to enjoy the manifold
liberties to which our history entitles us--and have a whale of a
good time doing it! I thank you!"

That was his first act as President. His second was to take up
residence in the White House, where he sat down in the East Room
in his stocking feet and shouted at Lee Sarason, "This is what
I've been planning to do now for six years! I bet this is what
Lincoln used to do! Now let 'em assassinate me!"

His third, in his role as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, was
to order that the Minute Men be recognized as an unpaid but
official auxiliary of the Regular Army, subject only to their own
officers, to Buzz, and to High Marshal Sarason; and that rifles,
bayonets, automatic pistols, and machine guns be instantly issued
to them by government arsenals. That was at 4 P.M. Since 3 P.M.,
all over the country, bands of M.M.'s had been sitting gloating
over pistols and guns, twitching with desire to seize them.

Fourth coup was a special message, next morning, to Congress
(in session since January fourth, the third having been a
Sunday), demanding the instant passage of a bill embodying Point
Fifteen of his election platform--that he should have complete
control of legislation and execution, and the Supreme Court be
rendered incapable of blocking anything that it might amuse him
to do.

By Joint Resolution, with less than half an hour of debate,
both houses of Congress rejected that demand before 3 P.M., on
January twenty-first. Before six, the President had proclaimed
that a state of martial law existed during the "present crisis,"
and more than a hundred Congressmen had been arrested by Minute
Men, on direct orders from the President. The Congressmen who
were hotheaded enough to resist were cynically charged with
"inciting to riot"; they who went quietly were not charged at
all. It was blandly explained to the agitated press by Lee
Sarason that these latter quiet lads had been so threatened by
"irresponsible and seditious elements" that they were merely
being safeguarded. Sarason did not use the phrase "protective
arrest," which might have suggested things.

To the veteran reporters it was strange to see the titular
Secretary of State, theoretically a person of such dignity and
consequence that he could deal with the representatives of
foreign powers, acting as press-agent and yes-man for even the
President.

There were riots, instantly, all over Washington, all over
America.

The recalcitrant Congressmen had been penned in the District
Jail. Toward it, in the winter evening, marched a mob that was
noisily mutinous toward the Windrip for whom so many of them had
voted. Among the mob buzzed hundreds of Negroes, armed with
knives and old pistols, for one of the kidnaped Congressmen was a
Negro from Georgia, the first colored Georgian to hold high
office since carpetbagger days.

Surrounding the jail, behind machine guns, the rebels found a
few Regulars, many police, and a horde of Minute Men, but at
these last they jeered, calling them "Minnie Mouses" and "tin
soldiers" and "mama's boys." The M.M.'s looked nervously at their
officers and at the Regulars who were making so professional a
pretense of not being scared. The mob heaved bottles and dead
fish. Half-a-dozen policemen with guns and night sticks, trying
to push back the van of the mob, were buried under a human surf
and came up grotesquely battered and ununiformed--those who ever
did come up again. There were two shots; and one Minute Man
slumped to the jail steps, another stood ludicrously holding a
wrist that spurted blood.

The Minute Men--why, they said to themselves, they'd never
meant to be soldiers anyway--just wanted to have some fun
marching! They began to sneak into the edges of the mob, hiding
their uniform caps. That instant, from a powerful loudspeaker in
a lower window of the jail brayed the voice of President
Berzelius Windrip:

"I am addressing my own boys, the Minute Men, everywhere in
America! To you and you only I look for help to make America a
proud, rich land again. You have been scorned. They thought you
were the 'lower classes.' They wouldn't give you jobs. They told
you to sneak off like bums and get relief. They ordered you into
lousy C.C.C. camps. They said you were no good, because you were
poor. I tell you that you are, ever since yesterday noon,
the highest lords of the land--the aristocracy--the makers of the
new America of freedom and justice. Boys! I need you! Help
me--help me to help you! Stand fast! Anybody tries to block
you--give the swine the point of your bayonet!"

A machine-gunner M.M., who had listened reverently, let loose.
The mob began to drop, and into the backs of the wounded as they
went staggering away the M.M. infantry, running, poked their
bayonets. Such a juicy squash it made, and the fugitives looked
so amazed, so funny, as they tumbled in grotesque heaps!

The M.M.'s hadn't, in dreary hours of bayonet drill, known
this would be such sport. They'd have more of it now--and hadn't
the President of the United States himself told each of them,
personally, that he needed their aid?

When the remnants of Congress ventured to the Capitol, they
found it seeded with M.M.'s, while a regiment of Regulars, under
Major General Meinecke, paraded the grounds.

The Speaker of the House, and the Hon. Mr. Perley Beecroft,
Vice-President of the United States and Presiding Officer of the
Senate, had the power to declare that quorums were present. (If a
lot of members chose to dally in the district jail, enjoying
themselves instead of attending Congress, whose fault was that?)
Both houses passed a resolution declaring Point Fifteen
temporarily in effect, during the "crisis"--the legality of the
passage was doubtful, but just who was to contest it, even though
the members of the Supreme Court had not been placed under
protective arrest . . . merely confined each to his own house by
a squad of Minute Men!

Bishop Paul Peter Prang had (his friends said afterward) been
dismayed by Windrip's stroke of state. Surely, he complained, Mr.
Windrip hadn't quite remembered to include Christian Amity in the
program he had taken from the League of Forgotten Men. Though Mr.
Prang had contentedly given up broadcasting ever since the
victory of Justice and Fraternity in the person of Berzelius
Windrip, he wanted to caution the public again, but when he
telephoned to his familiar station, WLFM in Chicago, the manager
informed him that "just temporarily, all access to the air was
forbidden," except as it was especially licensed by the offices
of Lee Sarason. (Oh, that was only one of sixteen jobs that Lee
and his six hundred new assistants had taken on in the past
week.)

Rather timorously, Bishop Prang motored from his home in
Persepolis, Indiana, to the Indianapolis airport and took a night
plane for Washington, to reprove, perhaps even playfully to
spank, his naughty disciple, Buzz.

He had little trouble in being admitted to see the President.
In fact, he was, the press feverishly reported, at the White
House for six hours, though whether he was with the President all
that time they could not discover. At three in the afternoon
Prang was seen to leave by a private entrance to the executive
offices and take a taxi. They noted that he was pale and
staggering.

In front of his hotel he was elbowed by a mob who in curiously
unmenacing and mechanical tones yelped, "Lynch um--downutha
enemies Windrip!" A dozen M.M.'s pierced the crowd and surrounded
the Bishop. The Ensign commanding them bellowed to the crowd, so
that all might hear, "You cowards leave the Bishop alone! Bishop,
come with us, and we'll see you're safe!"

Millions heard on their radios that evening the official
announcement that, to ward off mysterious plotters, probably
Bolsheviks, Bishop Prang had been safely shielded in the district
jail. And with it a personal statement from President Windrip
that he was filled with joy at having been able to "rescue from
the foul agitators my friend and mentor, Bishop P. P. Prang, than
whom there is no man living who I so admire and respect."

There was, as yet, no absolute censorship of the press; only a
confused imprisonment of journalists who offended the government
or local officers of the M.M.'s; and the papers chronically
opposed to Windrip carried by no means flattering hints that
Bishop Prang had rebuked the President and been plain jailed,
with no nonsense about a "rescue." These mutters reached
Persepolis.

Not all the Persepolitans ached with love for the Bishop or
considered him a modern St. Francis gathering up the little fowls
of the fields in his handsome LaSalle car. There were neighbors
who hinted that he was a window-peeping snooper after bootleggers
and obliging grass widows. But proud of him, their best
advertisement, they certainly were, and the Persepolis Chamber of
Commerce had caused to be erected at the Eastern gateway to Main
Street the sign: "Home of Bishop Prang, Radio's Greatest
Star."

So as one man Persepolis telegraphed to Washington, demanding
Prang's release, but a messenger in the Executive Offices who was
a Persepolis boy (he was, it is true, a colored man, but suddenly
he became a favorite son, lovingly remembered by old schoolmates)
tipped off the Mayor that the telegrams were among the
hundredweight of messages that were daily hauled away from the
White House unanswered.

Then a quarter of the citizenry of Persepolis mounted a
special train to "march" on Washington. It was one of those small
incidents which the opposition press could use as a bomb under
Windrip, and the train was accompanied by a score of high-ranking
reporters from Chicago and, later, from Pittsburgh, Baltimore,
and New York.

While the train was on its way--and it was curious what delays
and sidetrackings it encountered--a company of Minute Men at
Logansport, Indiana, rebelled against having to arrest a group of
Catholic nuns who were accused of having taught treasonably. High
Marshal Sarason felt that there must be a Lesson, early and
impressive. A battalion of M.M.'s, sent from Chicago in fast
trucks, arrested the mutinous company, and shot every third
man.

When the Persepolitans reached Washington, they were tearfully
informed, by a brigadier of M.M.'s who met them at the Union
Station, that poor Bishop Prang had been so shocked by the
treason of his fellow Indianans that he had gone melancholy mad
and they had tragically been compelled to shut him up in St.
Elizabeth's government insane asylum.

No one willing to carry news about him ever saw Bishop Prang
again.

The Brigadier brought greetings to the Persepolitans from the
President himself, and an invitation to stay at the Willard, at
government expense. Only a dozen accepted; the rest took the
first train back, not amiably; and from then on there was one
town in America in which no M.M. ever dared to appear in his
ducky forage cap and dark-blue tunic.

The Chief of Staff of the Regular Army had been deposed; in
his place was Major General Emmanuel Coon. Doremus and his like
were disappointed by General Coon's acceptance, for they had
always been informed, even by the Nation, that Emmanuel
Coon, though a professional army officer who did enjoy a fight,
preferred that that fight be on the side of the Lord; that he was
generous, literate, just, and a man of honor--and honor was the
one quality that Buzz Windrip wasn't even expected to understand.
Rumor said that Coon (as "Nordic" a Kentuckian as ever existed, a
descendant of men who had fought beside Kit Carson and Commodore
Perry) was particularly impatient with the puerility of
anti-Semitism, and that nothing so pleased him as, when he heard
new acquaintances being superior about the Jews, to snarl, "Did
you by any chance happen to notice that my name is Emmanuel Coon
and that Coon might be a corruption of some name rather familiar
on the East Side of New York?"

"Oh well, I suppose even General Coon feels, 'Orders are
Orders,'" sighed Doremus.

President Windrip's first extended proclamation to the country
was a pretty piece of literature and of tenderness. He explained
that powerful and secret enemies of American principles--one
rather gathered that they were a combination of Wall Street and
Soviet Russia--upon discovering, to their fury, that he,
Berzelius, was going to be President, had planned their last
charge. Everything would be tranquil in a few months, but
meantime there was a Crisis, during which the country must "bear
with him."

He recalled the military dictatorship of Lincoln and Stanton
during the Civil War, when civilian suspects were arrested
without warrant. He hinted how delightful everything was going to
be--right away now--just a moment--just a moment's patience--when
he had things in hand; and he wound up with a comparison of the
Crisis to the urgency of a fireman rescuing a pretty girl from a
"conflagration," and carrying her down a ladder, for her own
sake, whether she liked it or not, and no matter how appealingly
she might kick her pretty ankles.

The whole country laughed.

"Great card, that Buzz, but mighty competent guy," said the
electorate.

"I should worry whether Bish Prang or any other nut is in the
boobyhatch, long as I get my five thousand bucks a year, like
Windrip promised," said Shad Ledue to Charley Betts, the
furniture man.

It had all happened within the eight days following Windrip's
inauguration.

16

I have no desire to be President. I would much rather do my
humble best as a supporter of Bishop Prang, Ted Bilbo, Gene
Talmadge or any other broad-gauged but peppy Liberal. My only
longing is to Serve.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

Like many bachelors given to vigorous hunting and riding, Buck
Titus was a fastidious housekeeper, and his mid-Victorian
farmhouse fussily neat. It was also pleasantly bare: the living
room a monastic hall of heavy oak chairs, tables free of dainty
covers, numerous and rather solemn books of history and
exploration, with the conventional "sets," and a tremendous
fireplace of rough stone. And the ash trays were solid pottery
and pewter, able to cope with a whole evening of
cigarette-smoking. The whisky stood honestly on the oak buffet,
with siphons, and with cracked ice always ready in a thermos
jug.

It would, however, have been too much to expect Buck Titus not
to have red-and-black imitation English hunting-prints.

This hermitage, always grateful to Doremus, was sanctuary now,
and only with Buck could he adequately damn Windrip & Co. and
people like Francis Tasbrough, who in February was still saying,
"Yes, things do look kind of hectic down there in Washington, but
that's just because there's so many of these bullheaded
politicians that still think they can buck Windrip. Besides,
anyway, things like that couldn't ever happen here in New
England."

And, indeed, as Doremus went on his lawful occasions past the
red-brick Georgian houses, the slender spires of old white
churches facing the Green, as he heard the lazy irony of familiar
greetings from his acquaintances, men as enduring as their
Vermont hills, it seemed to him that the madness in the capital
was as alien and distant and unimportant as an earthquake in
Tibet.

Constantly, in the Informer, he criticized the
government but not too acidly.

The hysteria can't last; be patient, and wait and see, he
counseled his readers.

It was not that he was afraid of the authorities. He simply
did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure. It can't
happen here, said even Doremus--even now.

The one thing that most perplexed him was that there could be
a dictator seemingly so different from the fervent Hitlers and
gesticulating Fascists and the Cæsars with laurels round
bald domes; a dictator with something of the earthy American
sense of humor of a Mark Twain, a George Ade, a Will Rogers, an
Artemus Ward. Windrip could be ever so funny about solemn
jaw-drooping opponents, and about the best method of training
what he called "a Siamese flea hound." Did that, puzzled Doremus,
make him less or more dangerous?

Then he remembered the most cruel-mad of all pirates, Sir
Henry Morgan, who had thought it ever so funny to sew a victim up
in wet rawhide and watch it shrink in the sun.

From the perseverance with which they bickered, you could tell
that Buck Titus and Lorinda were much fonder of each other than
they would admit. Being a person who read little and therefore
took what he did read seriously, Buck was distressed by the
normally studious Lorinda's vacation liking for novels about
distressed princesses, and when she airily insisted that they
were better guides to conduct than Anthony Trollope or Thomas
Hardy, Buck roared at her and, in the feebleness of baited
strength, nervously filled pipes and knocked them out against the
stone mantel. But he approved of the relationship between Doremus
and Lorinda, which only he (and Shad Ledue!) had guessed, and
over Doremus, ten years his senior, this shaggy-headed woodsman
fussed like a thwarted spinster.

To both Doremus and Lorinda, Buck's overgrown shack became
their refuge. And they needed it, late in February, five weeks or
thereabouts after Windrip's election.

Despite strikes and riots all over the country, bloodily put
down by the Minute Men, Windrip's power in Washington was
maintained. The most liberal four members of the Supreme Court
resigned and were replaced by surprisingly unknown lawyers who
called President Windrip by his first name. A number of
Congressmen were still being "protected" in the District of
Columbia jail; others had seen the blinding light forever shed by
the goddess Reason and happily returned to the Capitol. The
Minute Men were increasingly loyal--they were still unpaid
volunteers, but provided with "expense accounts" considerably
larger than the pay of the regular troops. Never in American
history had the adherents of a President been so well satisfied;
they were not only appointed to whatever political jobs there
were but to ever so many that really were not; and with such
annoyances as Congressional Investigations hushed, the official
awarders of contracts were on the merriest of terms with all
contractors. . . . One veteran lobbyist for steel corporations
complained that there was no more sport in his hunting--you were
not only allowed but expected to shoot all government
purchasing-agents sitting.

None of the changes was so publicized as the Presidential
mandate abruptly ending the separate existence of the different
states, and dividing the whole country into eight
"provinces"--thus, asserted Windrip, economizing by reducing the
number of governors and all other state officers and, asserted
Windrip's enemies, better enabling him to concentrate his private
army and hold the country.

The new "Northeastern Province" included all of New York State
north of a line through Ossining, and all of New England except a
strip of Connecticut shore as far east as New Haven. This was,
Doremus admitted, a natural and homogeneous division, and even
more natural seemed the urban and industrial "Metropolitan
Province," which included Greater New York, Westchester County up
to Ossining, Long Island, the strip of Connecticut dependent on
New York City, New Jersey, northern Delaware, and Pennsylvania as
far as Reading and Scranton.

Each province was divided into numbered districts, each
district into lettered counties, each county into townships and
cities, and only in these last did the old names, with their
traditional appeal, remain to endanger President Windrip by
memories of honorable local history. And it was gossiped that,
next, the government would change even the town names--that they
were already thinking fondly of calling New York "Berzelian" and
San Francisco "San Sarason." Probably that gossip was false.

The Northeastern Province's six districts were: 1, Upper New
York State west of and including Syracuse; 2, New York east of
it; 3, Vermont and New Hampshire; 4, Maine; 5, Massachusetts; 6,
Rhode Island and the unraped portion of Connecticut.

District 3, Doremus Jessup's district, was divided into the
four "counties" of southern and northern Vermont, and southern
and northern New Hampshire, with Hanover for capital--the
District Commissioner merely chased the Dartmouth students out
and took over the college buildings for his offices, to the
considerable approval of Amherst, Williams, and Yale.

So Doremus was living, now, in Northeastern Province, District
3, County B, township of Beulah, and over him for his admiration
and rejoicing were a provincial commissioner, a district
commissioner, a county commissioner, an assistant county
commissioner in charge of Beulah Township, and all their
appertaining M.M. guards and emergency military judges.

Citizens who had lived in any one state for more than ten
years seemed to resent more hotly the loss of that state's
identity than they did the castration of the Congress and Supreme
Court of the United States--indeed, they resented it almost as
much as the fact that, while late January, February, and most of
March went by, they still were not receiving their governmental
gifts of $5000 (or perhaps it would beautifully be $10,000)
apiece; had indeed received nothing more than cheery bulletins
from Washington to the effect that the "Capital Levy Board," or
C.L.B. was holding sessions.

Virginians whose grandfathers had fought beside Lee shouted
that they'd be damned if they'd give up the hallowed state name
and form just one arbitrary section of an administrative unit
containing eleven Southern states; San Franciscans who had
considered Los Angelinos even worse than denizens of Miami now
wailed with agony when California was sundered and the northern
portion lumped in with Oregon, Nevada, and others as the
"Mountain and Pacific Province," while southern California was,
without her permission, assigned to the Southwestern Province,
along with Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Hawaii. As
some hint of Buzz Windrip's vision for the future, it was
interesting to read that this Southwestern Province was also to
be permitted to claim "all portions of Mexico which the United
States may from time to time find it necessary to take over, as a
protection against the notorious treachery of Mexico and the
Jewish plots there hatched."

"Lee Sarason is even more generous than Hitler and Alfred
Rosenberg in protecting the future of other countries," sighed
Doremus.

As Provincial Commissioner of the Northeastern Province,
comprising Upper New York State and New England, was appointed
Colonel Dewey Haik, that soldier-lawyer-politician-aviator who
was the chilliest-blooded and most arrogant of all the satellites
of Windrip yet had so captivated miners and fishermen during the
campaign. He was a strong-flying eagle who liked his meat bloody.
As District Commissioner of District 3--Vermont and New
Hampshire--appeared, to Doremus's mingled derision and fury, none
other than John Sullivan Reek, that stuffiest of stuffed-shirts,
that most gaseous gas bag, that most amenable machine politician
of Northern New England; a Republican ex-governor who had, in the
alembic of Windrip's patriotism, rosily turned Leaguer.

No one had ever troubled to be obsequious to the Hon. J. S.
Reek, even when he had been Governor. The weediest back-country
Representative had called him "Johnny," in the gubernatorial
mansion (twelve rooms and a leaky roof); and the youngest
reporter had bawled, "Well, what bull you handing out today,
Ex?"

It was this Commissioner Reek who summoned all the editors in
his district to meet him at his new viceregal lodge in Dartmouth
Library and receive the precious privileged information as to how
much President Windrip and his subordinate commissioners admired
the gentlemen of the press.

Before he left for the press conference in Hanover, Doremus
received from Sissy a "poem"--at least she called it that--which
Buck Titus, Lorinda Pike, Julian Falck, and she had painfully
composed, late at night, in Buck's fortified manor house:

Be meek with Reek,Go fake with Haik.One rhymes with sneak,And t' other with snake.Haik, with his beak,Is on the make,But Sullivan Reek-- Oh God!

"Well, anyway, Windrip's put everybody to work. And he's
driven all these unsightly billboards off the highways--much
better for the tourist trade," said all the old editors, even
those who wondered if the President wasn't perhaps the least bit
arbitrary.

As he drove to Hanover, Doremus saw hundreds of huge
billboards by the road. But they bore only Windrip propaganda and
underneath, "with the compliments of a loyal firm" and--very
large--"Montgomery Cigarettes" or "Jonquil Foot Soap." On the
short walk from a parking-space to the former Dartmouth campus,
three several men muttered to him, "Give us a nickel for cuppa
coffee, Boss--a Minnie Mouse has got my job and the Mouses won't
take me--they say I'm too old." But that may have been propaganda
from Moscow.

On the long porch of the Hanover Inn, officers of the Minute
Men were reclining in deck chairs, their spurred boots (in all
the M.M. organization there was no cavalry) up on the
railing.

Doremus passed a science building in front of which was a pile
of broken laboratory glassware, and in one stripped laboratory he
could see a small squad of M.M.'s drilling.

District Commissioner John Sullivan Reek affectionately
received the editors in a classroom. . . . Old men, used to being
revered as prophets, sitting anxiously in trifling chairs, facing
a fat man in the uniform of an M.M. commander, who smoked an
unmilitary cigar as his pulpy hand waved greeting.

Reek took not more than an hour to relate what would have
taken the most intelligent man five or six hours--that is, five
minutes of speech and the rest of the five hours to recover from
the nausea caused by having to utter such shameless rot. . . .
President Windrip, Secretary of State Sarason, Provincial
Commissioner Haik, and himself, John Sullivan Reek, they were all
being misrepresented by the Republicans, the Jeffersonians, the
Communists, England, the Nazis, and probably the jute and herring
industries; and what the government wanted was for any reporter
to call on any member of this Administration, and especially on
Commissioner Reek, at any time--except perhaps between 3 and 7
A.M.--and "get the real low-down."

Excellency Reek announced, then: "And now, gentlemen, I am
giving myself the privilege of introducing you to all four of the
County Commissioners, who were just chosen yesterday. Probably
each of you will know personally the commissioner from your own
county, but I want you to intimately and cooperatively know all
four, because, whomever they may be, they join with me in my
unquenchable admiration of the press."

The four County Commissioners, as one by one they shambled
into the room and were introduced, seemed to Doremus an oddish
lot: A moth-eaten lawyer known more for his quotations from
Shakespeare and Robert W. Service than for his shrewdness before
a jury. He was luminously bald except for a prickle of faded
rusty hair, but you felt that, if he had his rights, he would
have the floating locks of a tragedian of 1890.

A battling clergyman famed for raiding roadhouses.

A rather shy workman, an authentic proletarian, who seemed
surprised to find himself there. (He was replaced, a month later,
by a popular osteopath with an interest in politics and
vegetarianism.)

The fourth dignitary to come in and affectionately bow to the
editors, a bulky man, formidable-looking in his uniform as a
battalion leader of Minute Men, introduced as the Commissioner
for northern Vermont, Doremus Jessup's county, was Mr. Oscar
Ledue, formerly known as "Shad."

Mr. Reek called him "Captain" Ledue. Doremus remembered that
Shad's only military service, prior to Windrip's election, had
been as an A.E.F. private who had never got beyond a
training-camp in America and whose fiercest experience in battle
had been licking a corporal when in liquor.

"Sure," said Captain Ledue. "I've met old Jessup, all right,
all right! He don't know what it's all about. He don't know the
first thing about the economics of our social Revolution. He's a
Cho-vinis. But he isn't such a bad old coot, and I'll let him
ride as long as he behaves himself!"

"Splendid!" said the Hon. Mr. Reek.

17

Like beefsteak and potatoes stick to your ribs even if you're
working your head off, so the words of the Good Book stick by you
in perplexity and tribulation. If I ever held a high position
over my people, I hope that my ministers would be quoting, from
II Kings, 18; 31 & 32: "Come out to me, and then eat ye every
man of his own vine, and every one of his fig tree, and drink ye
every one the waters of his cistern, until I come and take you
away to a land of corn and wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a
land of olive oil and honey, that ye may live and not die."

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

Despite the claims of Montpelier, the former capital of
Vermont, and of Burlington, largest town in the state, Captain
Shad Ledue fixed on Fort Beulah as executive center of County B,
which was made out of nine former counties of northern Vermont.
Doremus never decided whether this was, as Lorinda Pike asserted,
because Shad was in partnership with Banker R. C. Crowley in the
profits derived from the purchase of quite useless old dwellings
as part of his headquarters, or for the even sounder purpose of
showing himself off, in battalion leader's uniform with the
letters "C.C." beneath the five-pointed star on his collar, to
the pals with whom he had once played pool and drunk applejack,
and to the "snobs" whose lawns he once had mowed.

Besides the condemned dwellings, Shad took over all of the
former Scotland County courthouse and established his private
office in the judge's chambers, merely chucking out the law books
and replacing them with piles of magazines devoted to the movies
and the detection of crime, hanging up portraits of Windrip,
Sarason, Haik, and Reek, installing two deep chairs upholstered
in poison-green plush (ordered from the store of the loyal
Charley Betts but, to Betts's fury, charged to the government, to
be paid for if and when) and doubling the number of judicial
cuspidors.

In the top center drawer of his desk Shad kept a photograph
from a nudist camp, a flask of Benedictine, a .44 revolver, and a
dog whip.

County commissioners were allowed from one to a dozen
assistant commissioners, depending on the population. Doremus
Jessup was alarmed when he discovered that Shad had had the
shrewdness to choose as assistants men of some education and
pretense to manners, with "Professor" Emil Staubmeyer as
Assistant County Commissioner in charge of the Township of
Beulah, which included the villages of Fort Beulah, West and
North Beulah, Beulah Center, Trianon, Hosea, and Keezmet.

As Shad had, without benefit of bayonets, become a captain, so
Mr. Staubmeyer (author of Hitler and Other Poems of
Passion--unpublished) automatically became a doctor.

Perhaps, thought Doremus, he would understand Windrip &
Co. better through seeing them faintly reflected in Shad and
Staubmeyer than he would have in the confusing glare of
Washington; and understand thus that a Buzz Windrip--a
Bismarck--a Cæsar--a Pericles was like all the rest of
itching, indigesting, aspiring humanity except that each of these
heroes had a higher degree of ambition and more willingness to
kill.

By June, the enrollment of the Minute Men had increased to
562,000, and the force was now able to accept as new members only
such trusty patriots and pugilists as it preferred. The War
Department was frankly allowing them not just "expense money" but
payment ranging from ten dollars a week for "inspectors" with a
few hours of weekly duty in drilling, to $9700 a year for
"brigadiers" on full time, and $16,000 for the High Marshal, Lee
Sarason . . . fortunately without interfering with the salaries
from his other onerous duties.

The M.M. ranks were: inspector, more or less corresponding to
private; squad leader, or corporal; cornet, or sergeant; ensign,
or lieutenant; battalion leader, a combination of captain, major,
and lieutenant colonel; commander, or colonel; brigadier, or
general; high marshal, or commanding general. Cynics suggested
that these honorable titles derived more from the Salvation Army
than the fighting forces, but be that cheap sneer justified or
no, the fact remains that an M.M. helot had ever so much more
pride in being called an "inspector," an awing designation in all
police circles, than in being a "private."

Since all members of the National Guard were not only allowed
but encouraged to become members of the Minute Men also, since
all veterans of the Great War were given special privileges, and
since "Colonel" Osceola Luthorne, the Secretary of War, was
generous about lending regular army officers to Secretary of
State Sarason for use as drill masters in the M.M.'s, there was a
surprising proportion of trained men for so newly born an
army.

Lee Sarason had proven to President Windrip by statistics from
the Great War that college education, and even the study of the
horrors of other conflicts, did not weaken the masculinity of the
students, but actually made them more patriotic, flag-waving, and
skillful in the direction of slaughter than the average youth,
and nearly every college in the country was to have, this coming
autumn, its own battalion of M.M.'s, with drill counting as
credit toward graduation. The collegians were to be schooled as
officers. Another splendid source of M.M. officers were the
gymnasiums and the classes in Business Administration of the
Y.M.C.A.

Most of the rank and file, however, were young farmers
delighted by the chance to go to town and to drive automobiles as
fast as they wanted to; young factory employees who preferred
uniforms and the authority to kick elderly citizens above
overalls and stooping over machines; and rather a large number of
former criminals, ex-bootleggers, ex-burglars, ex-labor
racketeers, who, for their skill with guns and leather
life-preservers, and for their assurances that the majesty of the
Five-Pointed Star had completely reformed them, were forgiven
their earlier blunders in ethics and were warmly accepted in the
M.M. Storm Troops.

It was said that one of the least of these erring children was
the first patriot to name President Windrip "the Chief," meaning
Führer, or Imperial Wizard of the K.K.K., or Il Duce, or
Imperial Potentate of the Mystic Shrine, or Commodore, or
University Coach, or anything else supremely noble and
good-hearted. So, on the glorious anniversary of July 4, 1937,
more than five hundred thousand young uniformed vigilantes,
scattered in towns from Guam to Bar Harbor, from Point Barrow to
Key West, stood at parade rest and sang, like the choiring
seraphim:

"Buzz and buzz and hail the Chief, And his five-pointed sta-ar,The U.S. ne'er can come to grief With us prepared for wa-ar."

Certain critical spirits felt that this version of the chorus
of "Buzz and Buzz," now the official M.M. anthem, showed, in a
certain roughness, the lack of Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch's
fastidious hand. But nothing could be done about it. She was said
to be in China, organizing chain letters. And even while that
uneasiness was over the M.M., upon the very next day came the
blow.

Someone on High Marshal Sarason's staff noticed that the
U.S.S.R.'s emblem was not a six-pointed star, but a five-pointed
one, even like America's, so that we were not insulting the
Soviets at all.

Consternation was universal. From Sarason's office came
sulphurous rebuke to the unknown idiot who had first made the
mistake (generally he was believed to be Lee Sarason) and the
command that a new emblem be suggested by every member of the
M.M. Day and night for three days, M.M. barracks were hectic with
telegrams, telephone calls, letters, placards, and thousands of
young men sat with pencils and rulers earnestly drawing tens of
thousands of substitutes for the five-pointed star: circles in
triangles, triangles in circles, pentagons, hexagons, alphas and
omegas, eagles, aeroplanes, arrows, bombs bursting in air, bombs
bursting in bushes, billy-goats, rhinoceri, and the Yosemite
Valley. It was circulated that a young ensign on High Marshal
Sarason's staff had, in agony over the error, committed suicide.
Everybody thought that this hara-kiri was a fine idea and showed
sensibility on the part of the better M.M.'s; and they went on
thinking so even after it proved that the Ensign had merely got
drunk at the Buzz Backgammon Club and talked about suicide.

In the end, despite his uncounted competitors, it was the
great mystic, Lee Sarason himself, who found the perfect new
emblem--a ship's steering wheel.

It symbolized, he pointed out, not only the Ship of State but
also the wheels of American industry, the wheels and the steering
wheel of motorcars, the wheel diagram which Father Coughlin had
suggested two years before as symbolizing the program of the
National Union for Social Justice, and, particularly, the wheel
emblem of the Rotary Club.

Sarason's proclamation also pointed out that it would not be
too far-fetched to declare that, with a little drafting
treatment, the arms of the Swastika could be seen as
unquestionably related to the circle, and how about the K.K.K. of
the Kuklux Klan? Three K's made a triangle, didn't they? and
everybody knew that a triangle was related to a circle.

So it was that in September, at the demonstrations on Loyalty
Day (which replaced Labor Day), the same wide-flung seraphim
sang:

"Buzz and buzz and hail the Chief, And th' mystic steering whee-el,The U.S. ne'er can come to grief While we defend its we-al."

In mid-August, President Windrip announced that, since all its
aims were being accomplished, the League of Forgotten Men
(founded by one Rev. Mr. Prang, who was mentioned in the
proclamation only as a person in past history) was now
terminated. So were all the older parties, Democratic,
Republican, Farmer-Labor, or what not. There was to be only one:
The American Corporate State and Patriotic Party--no! added the
President, with something of his former good-humor: "there are
two parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any
party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of
luck!"

The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary
Sarason had more or less taken from Italy. All occupations were
divided into six classes: agriculture, industry, commerce,
transportation and communication, banking and insurance and
investment, and a grab-bag class including the arts, sciences,
and teaching. The American Federation of Labor, the Railway
Brotherhoods, and all other labor organizations, along with the
Federal Department of Labor, were supplanted by local Syndicates
composed of individual workers, above which were Provincial
Confederations, all under governmental guidance. Parallel to them
in each occupation were Syndicates and Confederations of
employers. Finally, the six Confederations of workers and the six
Confederations of employers were combined in six joint federal
Corporations, which elected the twenty-four members of the
National Council of Corporations, which initiated or supervised
all legislation relating to labor or business.

There was a permanent chairman of this National Council, with
a deciding vote and the power of regulating all debate as he saw
fit, but he was not elected--he was appointed by the President;
and the first to hold the office (without interfering with his
other duties) was Secretary of State Lee Sarason. Just to
safeguard the liberties of Labor, this chairman had the right to
dismiss any unreasonable member of the National Council.

All strikes and lockouts were forbidden under federal
penalties, so that workmen listened to reasonable government
representatives and not to unscrupulous agitators.

Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or,
familiarly, the "Corpos," which nickname was generally used.

By ill-natured people the Corpos were called "the Corpses."
But they were not at all corpse-like. That description would more
correctly, and increasingly, have applied to their enemies.

Though the Corpos continued to promise a gift of at least
$5000 to every family, "as soon as funding of the required bond
issue shall be completed," the actual management of the poor,
particularly of the more surly and dissatisfied poor, was
undertaken by the Minute Men.

It could now be published to the world, and decidedly it was
published, that unemployment had, under the benign reign of
President Berzelius Windrip, almost disappeared. Almost all
workless men were assembled in enormous labor camps, under M.M.
officers. Their wives and children accompanied them and took care
of the cooking, cleaning, and repair of clothes. The men did not
merely work on state projects; they were also hired out at the
reasonable rate of one dollar a day to private employers. Of
course, so selfish is human nature even in Utopia, this did cause
most employers to discharge the men to whom they had been paying
more than a dollar a day, but that took care of itself, because
these overpaid malcontents in their turn were forced into the
labor camps.

Out of their dollar a day, the workers in the camps had to pay
from seventy to ninety cents a day for board and lodging.

There was a certain discontentment among people who had once
owned motorcars and bathrooms and eaten meat twice daily, at
having to walk ten or twenty miles a day, bathe once a week,
along with fifty others, in a long trough, get meat only twice a
week--when they got it--and sleep in bunks, a hundred in a room.
Yet there was less rebellion than a mere rationalist like Walt
Trowbridge, Windrip's ludicrously defeated rival, would have
expected, for every evening the loudspeaker brought to the
workers the precious voices of Windrip and Sarason,
Vice-President Beecroft, Secretary of War Luthorne, Secretary of
Education and Propaganda Macgoblin, General Coon, or some other
genius, and these Olympians, talking to the dirtiest and tiredest
mudsills as warm friend to friend, told them that they were the
honored foundation stones of a New Civilization, the advance
guards of the conquest of the whole world.

They took it, too, like Napoleon's soldiers. And they had the
Jews and the Negroes to look down on, more and more. The M.M.'s
saw to that. Every man is a king so long as he has someone to
look down on.

Each week the government said less about the findings of the
board of inquiry which was to decide how the $5000 per person
could be wangled. It became easier to answer malcontents with a
cuff from a Minute Man than by repetitious statements from
Washington.

But most of the planks in Windrip's platform really were
carried out--according to a sane interpretation of them. For
example, inflation.

In America of this period, inflation did not even compare with
the German inflation of the 1920's, but it was sufficient. The
wage in the labor camps had to be raised from a dollar a day to
three, with which the workers were receiving an equivalent of
sixty cents a day in 1914 values. Everybody delightfully
profited, except the very poor, the common workmen, the skilled
workmen, the small business men, the professional men, and old
couples living on annuities or their savings--these last did
really suffer a little, as their incomes were cut in three. The
workers, with apparently tripled wages, saw the cost of
everything in the shops much more than triple.

Agriculture, which was most of all to have profited from
inflation, on the theory that the mercurial crop-prices would
rise faster than anything else, actually suffered the most of
all, because, after a first flurry of foreign buying, importers
of American products found it impossible to deal in so skittish a
market, and American food exports--such of them as were
left--ceased completely.

It was Big Business, that ancient dragon which Bishop Prang
and Senator Windrip had gone forth to slay, that had the
interesting time.

With the value of the dollar changing daily, the elaborate
systems of cost-marking and credit of Big Business were so
confused that presidents and sales-managers sat in their offices
after midnight, with wet towels. But they got some comfort,
because with the depreciated dollar they were able to recall all
bonded indebtedness and, paying it off at the old face values,
get rid of it at thirty cents on the hundred. With this, and the
currency so wavering that employees did not know just what they
ought to get in wages, and labor unions eliminated, the larger
industrialists came through the inflation with perhaps double the
wealth, in real values, that they had had in 1936.

And two other planks in Windrip's encyclical vigorously
respected were those eliminating the Negroes and patronizing the
Jews.

The former race took it the less agreeably. There were
horrible instances in which whole Southern counties with a
majority of Negro population were overrun by the blacks and all
property seized. True, their leaders alleged that this followed
massacres of Negroes by Minute Men. But as Dr. Macgoblin,
Secretary of Culture, so well said, this whole subject was
unpleasant and therefore not helpful to discuss.

All over the country, the true spirit of Windrip's Plank Nine,
regarding the Jews, was faithfully carried out. It was understood
that the Jews were no longer to be barred from fashionable
hotels, as in the hideous earlier day of race prejudice, but
merely to be charged double rates. It was understood that Jews
were never to be discouraged from trading but were merely to pay
higher graft to commissioners and inspectors and to accept
without debate all regulations, wage rates, and price lists
decided upon by the stainless Anglo-Saxons of the various
merchants' associations. And that all Jews of all conditions were
frequently to sound their ecstasy in having found in America a
sanctuary, after their deplorable experiences among the
prejudices of Europe.

In Fort Beulah, Louis Rotenstern, since he had always been the
first to stand up for the older official national anthems, "The
Star-Spangled Banner" or "Dixie," and now for "Buzz and Buzz,"
since he had of old been considered almost an authentic friend by
Francis Tasbrough and R. C. Crowley, and since he had often
good-naturedly pressed the unrecognized Shad Ledue's Sunday pants
without charge, was permitted to retain his tailor shop, though
it was understood that he was to charge members of the M.M.
prices that were only nominal, or quarter nominal.

But one Harry Kindermann, a Jew who had profiteered enough as
agent for maple-sugar and dairy machinery so that in 1936 he had
been paying the last installment on his new bungalow and on his
Buick, had always been what Shad Ledue called "a fresh Kike." He
had laughed at the flag, the Church, and even Rotary. Now he
found the manufacturers canceling his agencies, without
explanation.

By the middle of 1937 he was selling frankfurters by the road,
and his wife, who had been so proud of the piano and the old
American pine cupboard in their bungalow, was dead, from
pneumonia caught in the one-room tar-paper shack into which they
had moved.

At the time of Windrip's election, there had been more than
80,000 relief administrators employed by the federal and local
governments in America. With the labor camps absorbing most
people on relief, this army of social workers, both amateurs and
long-trained professional uplifters, was stranded.

The Minute Men controlling the labor camps were generous: they
offered the charitarians the same dollar a day that the
proletarians received, with special low rates for board and
lodging. But the cleverer social workers received a much better
offer: to help list every family and every unmarried person in
the country, with his or her finances, professional ability,
military training and, most important and most tactfully to be
ascertained, his or her secret opinion of the M.M.'s and of the
Corpos in general.

A good many of the social workers indignantly said that this
was asking them to be spies, stool pigeons for the American Oh
Gay Pay Oo. These were, on various unimportant charges, sent to
jail or, later, to concentration camps--which were also jails,
but the private jails of the M.M.'s, unshackled by any
old-fashioned, nonsensical prison regulations.

In the confusion of the summer and early autumn of 1937, local
M.M. officers had a splendid time making their own laws, and such
congenital traitors and bellyachers as Jewish doctors, Jewish
musicians, Negro journalists, socialistic college professors,
young men who preferred reading or chemical research to manly
service with the M.M.'s, women who complained when their men had
been taken away by the M.M.'s and had disappeared, were
increasingly beaten in the streets, or arrested on charges that
would not have been very familiar to pre-Corpo jurists.

And, increasingly, the bourgeois counter revolutionists began
to escape to Canada; just as once, by the "underground railroad"
the Negro slaves had escaped into that free Northern air.

In Canada, as well as in Mexico, Bermuda, Jamaica, Cuba, and
Europe, these lying Red propagandists began to publish the vilest
little magazines, accusing the Corpos of murderous
terrorism--allegations that a band of six M.M.'s had beaten an
aged rabbi and robbed him; that the editor of a small labor paper
in Paterson had been tied to his printing press and left there
while the M.M.'s burned the plant; that the pretty daughter of an
ex-Farmer-Labor politician in Iowa had been raped by giggling
young men in masks.

To end this cowardly flight of the lying counter
revolutionists (many of whom, once accepted as reputable
preachers and lawyers and doctors and writers and ex-congressmen
and ex-army officers, were able to give a wickedly false
impression of Corpoism and the M.M.'s to the world outside
America) the government quadrupled the guards who were halting
suspects at every harbor and at even the minutest trails crossing
the border; and in one quick raid, it poured M.M. storm troopers
into all airports, private or public, and all aeroplane
factories, and thus, they hoped, closed the air lanes to skulking
traitors.

As one of the most poisonous counter revolutionists in the
country, Ex-Senator Walt Trowbridge, Windrip's rival in the
election of 1936, was watched night and day by a rotation of
twelve M.M. guards. But there seemed to be small danger that this
opponent, who, after all, was a crank but not an intransigent
maniac, would make himself ridiculous by fighting against the
great Power which (per Bishop Prang) Heaven had been pleased to
send for the healing of distressed America.

Trowbridge remained prosaically on a ranch he owned in South
Dakota, and the government agent commanding the M.M.'s (a skilled
man, trained in breaking strikes) reported that on his tapped
telephone wire and in his steamed-open letters, Trowbridge
communicated nothing more seditious than reports on growing
alfalfa. He had with him no one but ranch hands and, in the
house, an innocent aged couple.

Washington hoped that Trowbridge was beginning to see the
light. Maybe they would make him Ambassador to Britain, vice
Sinclair.

On the Fourth of July, when the M.M's gave their glorious but
unfortunate tribute to the Chief and the Five-pointed Star,
Trowbridge gratified his cow-punchers by holding an unusually
pyrotechnic celebration. All evening skyrockets flared up, and
round the home pasture glowed pots of Roman fire. Far from
cold-shouldering the M.M. guards, Trowbridge warmly invited them
to help set off rockets and join the gang in beer and sausages.
The lonely soldier boys off there on the prairie--they were so
happy shooting rockets!

An aeroplane with a Canadian license, a large plane, flying
without lights, sped toward the rocket-lighted area and, with
engine shut off, so that the guards could not tell whether it had
flown on, circled the pasture outlined by the Roman fire and
swiftly landed.

The guards had felt sleepy after the last bottle of beer.
Three of them were napping on the short, rough grass.

They were rather disconcertingly surrounded by men in masking
flying-helmets, men carrying automatic pistols, who handcuffed
the guards that were still awake, picked up the others, and
stored all twelve of them in the barred baggage compartment of
the plane.

The raiders' leader, a military-looking man, said to Walt
Trowbridge, "Ready, sir?"

"Yep. Just take those four boxes, will you, please,
Colonel?"

The boxes contained photostats of letters and documents.

Unregally clad in overalls and a huge straw hat, Senator
Trowbridge entered the pilots' compartment. High and swift and
alone, the plane flew toward the premature Northern Lights.

Next morning, still in overalls, Trowbridge breakfasted at the
Fort Garry Hotel with the Mayor of Winnipeg.

A fortnight later, in Toronto, he began the republication of
his weekly, A Lance for Democracy, and on the cover of the
first number were reproductions of four letters indicating that
before he became President, Berzelius Windrip had profited
through personal gifts from financiers to an amount of over
$1,000,000. To Doremus Jessup, to some thousands of Doremus
Jessups, were smuggled copies of the Lance, though
possession of it was punishable (perhaps not legally, but
certainly effectively) by death.

But it was not till the winter, so carefully did his secret
agents have to work in America, that Trowbridge had in full
operation the organization called by its operatives the "New
Underground," the "N.U.," which aided thousands of counter
revolutionists to escape into Canada.

18

In the little towns, ah, there is the abiding peace that I
love, and that can never be disturbed by even the noisiest Smart
Alecks from these haughty megalopolises like Washington, New
York, & etc.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

Doremus's policy of "wait and see," like most Fabian policies,
had grown shaky. It seemed particularly shaky in June, 1937, when
he drove to North Beulah for the fortieth graduation anniversary
of his class in Isaiah College.

As the custom was, the returned alumni wore comic costumes.
His class had sailor suits, but they walked about, bald-headed
and lugubrious, in these well-meant garments of joy, and there
was a look of instability even in the eyes of the three members
who were ardent Corpos (being local Corpo commissioners).

After the first hour Doremus saw little of his classmates. He
had looked up his familiar correspondent, Victor Loveland,
teacher in the classical department who, a year ago, had informed
him of President Owen J. Peaseley's ban on criticism of military
training.

At its best, Loveland's jerry-built imitation of an Anne
Hathaway cottage had been no palace--Isaiah assistant professors
did not customarily rent palaces. Now, with the pretentiously
smart living room heaped with burlap-covered chairs and rolled
rugs and boxes of books, it looked like a junkshop. Amid the
wreckage sat Loveland, his wife, his three children, and one Dr.
Arnold King, experimenter in chemistry.

"What's all this?" said Doremus.

"I've been fired. As too 'radical,'" growled Loveland.

"Yes! And his most vicious attack has been on Glicknow's
treatment of the use of the aorist in Hesiod!" wailed his
wife.

"Well, I deserve it--for not having been vicious about
anything since A.D. 300! Only thing I'm ashamed of is that
they're not firing me for having taught my students that the
Corpos have taken most of their ideas from Tiberius, or maybe for
having decently tried to assassinate District Commissioner Reek!"
said Loveland.

"Where you going?" inquired Doremus.

"That's just it! We don't know! Oh, first to my dad's
house--which is a six-room packing-box in Burlington--Dad's got
diabetes. But teaching--President Peaseley kept putting off
signing my new contract and just informed me ten days ago that
I'm through--much too late to get a job for next year. Myself, I
don't care a damn! Really I don't! I'm glad to have been made to
admit that as a college prof I haven't been, as I so liked to
convince myself, any Erasmus Junior, inspiring noble young souls
to dream of chaste classic beauty--save the mark!--but just a
plain hired man, another counter-jumper in the Marked-down
Classics Goods Department, with students for bored customers, and
as subject to being hired and fired as any janitor. Do you
remember that in Imperial Rome, the teachers, even the tutors of
the nobility, were slaves--allowed a lot of leeway, I suppose, in
their theories about the anthropology of Crete, but just as
likely to be strangled as the other slaves! I'm not
kicking--"

Dr. King, the chemist, interrupted with a whoop: "Sure you're
kicking! Why the hell not? With three kids? Why not kick!
Now me, I'm lucky! I'm half Jew--one of these sneaking, cunning
Jews that Buzz Windrip and his boyfriend Hitler tell you about;
so cunning I suspected what was going on months ago and so--I've
also just been fired, Mr. Jessup--I arranged for a job with the
Universal Electric Corporation. . . . They don't mind Jews there,
as long as they sing at their work and find boondoggles worth a
million a year to the company--at thirty-five hundred a year
salary! A fond farewell to all my grubby studes! Though--" and
Doremus thought he was, at heart, sadder than Loveland--"I do
kind of hate to give up my research. Oh, hell with 'em!"

The version of Owen J. Peaseley, M.A. (Oberlin), LL.D. (Conn.
State), president of Isaiah College, was quite different.

"Why no, Mr. Jessup! We believe absolutely in freedom of
speech and thought, here at old Isaiah. The fact is that we are
letting Loveland go only because the Classics Department is
overstaffed--so little demand for Greek and Sanskrit and so on,
you know, with all this modern interest in quantitative
bio-physics and aeroplane-repairing and so on. But as to Dr.
King--um--I'm afraid we did a little feel that he was riding for
a fall, boasting about being a Jew and all, you know, and--But
can't we talk of pleasanter subjects? You have probably learned
that Secretary of Culture Macgoblin has now completed his plan
for the appointment of a director of education in each province
and district?--and that Professor Almeric Trout of Aumbry
University is slated for Director in our Northeastern Province?
Well, I have something very gratifying to add. Dr. Trout--and
what a profound scholar, what an eloquent orator he is!--did you
know that in Teutonic 'Almeric' means 'noble prince'?--and he's
been so kind as to designate me as Director of Education for the
Vermont-New Hampshire District! Isn't that thrilling! I wanted
you to be one of the first to hear it, Mr. Jessup, because of
course one of the chief jobs of the Director will be to work with
and through the newspaper editors in the great task of spreading
correct Corporate ideals and combating false theories--yes, oh
yes."

It seemed as though a large number of people were zealous to
work with and through the editors these days, thought
Doremus.

He noticed that President Peaseley resembled a dummy made of
faded gray flannel of a quality intended for petticoats in an
orphan asylum.

The Minute Men's organization was less favored in the staid
villages than in the industrial centers, but all through the
summer it was known that a company of M.M.'s had been formed in
Fort Beulah and were drilling in the Armory under National Guard
officers and County Commissioner Ledue, who was seen sitting up
nights in his luxurious new room in Mrs. Ingot's boarding-house,
reading a manual of arms. But Doremus declined to go look at
them, and when his rustic but ambitious reporter, "Doc"
(otherwise Otis) Itchitt, came in throbbing about the M.M.'s and
wanted to run an illustrated account in the Saturday
Informer, Doremus sniffed.

It was not till their first public parade, in August, that
Doremus saw them, and not gladly.

The whole countryside had turned out; he could hear them
laughing and shuffling beneath his office window; but he
stubbornly stuck to editing an article on fertilizers for cherry
orchards. (And he loved parades, childishly!) Not even the sound
of a band pounding out "Boola, Boola" drew him to the window.
Then he was plucked up by Dan Wilgus, the veteran job compositor
and head of the Informer chapel, a man tall as a house and
possessed of such a sweeping black mustache as had not otherwise
been seen since the passing of the old-time bartender. "You got
to take a look, Boss; great show!" implored Dan.

Through the Chester-Arthur, red-brick prissiness of President
Street, Doremus saw marching a surprisingly well-drilled company
of young men in the uniforms of Civil War cavalrymen, and just as
they were opposite the Informer office, the town band
rollicked into "Marching through Georgia." The young men smiled,
they stepped more quickly, and held up their banner with the
steering wheel and M.M. upon it.

When he was ten, Doremus had seen in this self-same street a
Memorial Day parade of the G.A.R. The veterans were an average of
under fifty then, and some of them only thirty-five; they had
swung ahead lightly and gayly--and to the tune of "Marching
through Georgia." So now in 1937 he was looking down again on the
veterans of Gettysburg and Missionary Ridge. Oh--he could see
them all--Uncle Tom Veeder, who had made him the willow whistles;
old Mr. Crowley with his cornflower eyes; Jack Greenhill who
played leapfrog with the kids and who was to die in Ethan
Creek--They found him with thick hair dripping. Doremus thrilled
to the M.M. flags, the music, the valiant young men, even while
he hated all they marched for, and hated the Shad Ledue whom he
incredulously recognized in the brawny horseman at the head of
the procession.

He understood now why the young men marched to war. But "Oh
yeh--you think so!" he could hear Shad sneering through
the music.

The unwieldy humor characteristic of American politicians
persisted even through the eruption. Doremus read about and
sardonically "played up" in the Informer a minstrel show
given at the National Convention of Boosters' Clubs at Atlantic
City, late in August. As end-men and interlocutor appeared no
less distinguished persons than Secretary of the Treasury Webster
R. Skittle, Secretary of War Luthorne, and Secretary of Education
and Public Relations, Dr. Macgoblin. It was good, old-time Elks
Club humor, uncorroded by any of the notions of dignity and of
international obligations which, despite his great services, that
queer stick Lee Sarason was suspected of trying to introduce. Why
(marveled the Boosters) the Big Boys were so democratic that they
even kidded themselves and the Corpos, that's how unassuming they
were!

"Who was this lady I seen you going down the street with?"
demanded the plump Mr. Secretary Skittle (disguised as a colored
wench in polka-dotted cotton) of Mr. Secretary Luthorne (in
black-face and large red gloves).

"That wasn't no lady, that was Walt Trowbridge's paper."

"Ah don't think Ah cognosticates youse, Mist' Bones."

"Why--you know--'A Nance for Plutocracy.'"

Clean fun, not too confusingly subtle, drawing the people
(several millions listened on the radio to the Boosters' Club
show) closer to their great-hearted masters.

But the high point of the show was Dr. Macgoblin's daring to
tease his own faction by singing:

Buzz and booze and biz, what fun!This job gets drearier and drearier,When I get out of Washington,I'm going to Siberia!

It seemed to Doremus that he was hearing a great deal about
the Secretary of Education. Then, in late September, he heard
something not quite pleasant about Dr. Macgoblin. The story, as
he got it, ran thus:

Hector Macgoblin, that great surgeon-boxer-poet-sailor, had
always contrived to have plenty of enemies, but after the
beginning of his investigation of schools, to purge them of any
teachers he did not happen to like, he made so unusually many
that he was accompanied by bodyguards. At this time in September,
he was in New York, finding quantities of "subversive elements"
in Columbia University--against the protests of President
Nicholas Murray Butler, who insisted that he had already cleaned
out all willful and dangerous thinkers, especially the pacifists
in the medical school--and Macgoblin's bodyguards were two former
instructors in philosophy who in their respective universities
had been admired even by their deans for everything except the
fact that they would get drunk and quarrelsome. One of them, in
that state, always took off one shoe and hit people over the head
with the heel, if they argued in defense of Jung.

With these two in uniforms as M.M. battalion leaders--his own
was that of a brigadier--after a day usefully spent in kicking
out of Columbia all teachers who had voted for Trowbridge, Dr.
Macgoblin started off with his brace of bodyguards to try out a
wager that he could take a drink at every bar on Fifty-second
Street and still not pass out.

He had done well when, at ten-thirty, being then affectionate
and philanthropic, he decided that it would be a splendid idea to
telephone his revered former teacher in Leland Stanford, the
biologist Dr. Willy Schmidt, once of Vienna, now in Rockefeller
Institute. Macgoblin was indignant when someone at Dr. Schmidt's
apartment informed him that the doctor was out. Furiously: "Out?
Out? What d'you mean he's out? Old goat like that got no right to
be out! At midnight! Where is he? This is the Police Department
speaking! Where is he?"

Dr. Schmidt was spending the evening with that gentle scholar,
Rabbi Dr. Vincent de Verez.

Macgoblin and his learned gorillas went to call on De Verez.
On the way nothing of note happened except that when Macgoblin
discussed the fare with the taxi-driver, he felt impelled to
knock him out. The three, and they were in the happiest, most
boyish of spirits, burst joyfully into Dr. de Verez's primeval
house in the Sixties. The entrance hall was shabby enough, with a
humble show of the good rabbi's umbrellas and storm rubbers, and
had the invaders seen the bedrooms they would have found them
Trappist cells. But the long living room, front- and back-parlor
thrown together, was half museum, half lounge. Just because he
himself liked such things and resented a stranger's possessing
them, Macgoblin looked sniffily at a Beluchi prayer rug, a
Jacobean court cupboard, a small case of incunabula and of Arabic
manuscripts in silver upon scarlet parchment.

"Swell joint! Hello, Doc! How's the Dutchman? How's the
antibody research going? These are Doc Nemo and Doc, uh, Doc
Whoozis, the famous glue lifters. Great frenzh mine. Introduce us
to your Jew friend."

Now it is more than possible that Rabbi de Verez had never
heard of Secretary of Education Macgoblin.

The houseman who had let in the intruders and who nervously
hovered at the living-room door--he is the sole authority for
most of the story--said that Macgoblin staggered, slid on a rug,
almost fell, then giggled foolishly as he sat down, waving his
plug-ugly friends to chairs and demanding, "Hey, Rabbi, how about
some whisky? Lil Scotch and soda. I know you Geonim never lap up
anything but snow-cooled nectar handed out by a maiden with a
dulcimer, singing of Mount Abora, or maybe just a little shot of
Christian children's sacrificial blood--ha, ha, just a joke,
Rabbi; I know these 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' are all the
bunk, but awful handy in propaganda, just the same and--But I
mean, for plain Goyim like us, a little real hootch! Hear
me?"

Dr. Schmidt started to protest. The Rabbi, who had been
carding his white beard, silenced him and, with a wave of his
fragile old hand, signaled the waiting houseman, who reluctantly
brought in whisky and siphons.

The three coordinators of culture almost filled their glasses
before they poured in the soda.

"Look here, De Verez, why don't you kikes take a tumble to
yourselves and get out, beat it, exeunt bearing corpses, and
start a real Zion, say in South America?"

The Rabbi looked bewildered at the attack. Dr. Schmidt
snorted, "Dr. Macgoblin--once a promising pupil of mine--is
Secretary of Education and a lot of t'ings--I don't know vot!--at
Washington. Corpo!"

"Oh!" The Rabbi sighed. "I have heard of that cult, but my
people have learned to ignore persecution. We have been so
impudent as to adopt the tactics of your Early Christian Martyrs!
Even if we were invited to your Corporate feast--which, I
understand, we most warmly are not!--I am afraid we should not be
able to attend. You see, we believe in only one Dictator, God,
and I am afraid we cannot see Mr. Windrip as a rival to
Jehovah!"

"Aah, that's all baloney!" murmured one of the learned gunmen,
and Macgoblin shouted, "Oh, can the two-dollar words! There's
just one thing where we agree with the dirty, Kike-loving
Communists--that's in chucking the whole bunch of divinities,
Jehovah and all the rest of 'em, that've been on relief so
long!"

The Rabbi was unable even to answer, but little Dr. Schmidt
(he had a doughnut mustache, a beer belly, and black button boots
with soles half-an-inch thick) said, "Macgoblin, I suppose I may
talk frank wit' an old student, there not being any reporters or
loutspeakers arount. Do you know why you are drinking like a pig?
Because you are ashamt! Ashamt that you, once a promising
researcher, should have solt out to freebooters with brains like
decayed liver and--"

"That'll do from you, Prof!"

"Say, we oughtta tie those seditious sons of hounds up and
beat the daylight out of 'em!" whimpered one of the
watchdogs.

Macgoblin shrieked, "You highbrows--you stinking
intellectuals! You, you Kike, with your lush-luzurious library,
while Common People been starving--would be now if the Chief
hadn't saved 'em! Your c'lection books--stolen from the pennies
of your poor, dumb, foot-kissing congregation of pushcart
peddlers!"

The Rabbi sat bespelled, fingering his beard, but Dr. Schmidt
leaped up, crying, "You three scoundrels were not invited here!
You pushed your way in! Get out! Go! Get out!"

One of the accompanying dogs demanded of Macgoblin, "Going to
stand for these two Yiddles insulting us--insulting the whole by
God Corpo state and the M.M. uniform? Kill 'em!"

Now, to his already abundant priming, Macgoblin had added two
huge whiskies since he had come. He yanked out his automatic
pistol, fired twice. Dr. Schmidt toppled. Rabbi De Verez slid
down in his chair, his temple throbbing out blood. The houseman
trembled at the door, and one of the guards shot at him, then
chased him down the street, firing, and whooping with the humor
of the joke. This learned guard was killed instantly, at a street
crossing, by a traffic policeman.

Macgoblin and the other guard were arrested and brought before
the Commissioner of the Metropolitan District, the great Corpo
viceroy, whose power was that of three or four state governors
put together.

Dr. de Verez, though he was not yet dead, was too sunken to
testify. But the Commissioner thought that in a case so closely
touching the federal government, it would not be seemly to
postpone the trial.

Against the terrified evidence of the Rabbi's Russian-Polish
houseman were the earnest (and by now sober) accounts of the
federal Secretary of Education, and of his surviving aide,
formerly Assistant Professor of Philosophy in Pelouse University.
It was proven that not only De Verez but also Dr. Schmidt was a
Jew--which, incidentally, he 100 per cent was not. It was almost
proven that this sinister pair had been coaxing innocent Corpos
into De Verez's house and performing upon them what a scared
little Jewish stool pigeon called "ritual murders." Macgoblin and
friend were acquitted on grounds of self-defense and handsomely
complimented by the Commissioner--and later in telegrams from
President Windrip and Secretary of State Sarason--for having
defended the Commonwealth against human vampires and one of the
most horrifying plots known in history.

The policeman who had shot the other guard wasn't, so
scrupulous was Corpo justice, heavily punished--merely sent out
to a dreary beat in the Bronx. So everybody was happy.

But Doremus Jessup, on receiving a letter from a New York
reporter who had talked privately with the surviving guard, was
not so happy. He was not in a very gracious temper, anyway.
County Commissioner Shad Ledue, on grounds of humanitarianism,
had made him discharge his delivery boys and employ M.M.'s to
distribute (or cheerfully chuck into the river) the
Informer.

"Last straw--plenty last," he raged.

He had read about Rabbi de Verez and seen pictures of him. He
had once heard Dr. Willy Schmidt speak, when the State Medical
Association had met at Fort Beulah, and afterward had sat near
him at dinner. If they were murderous Jews, then he was a
murderous Jew too, he swore, and it was time to do something for
His Own People.

That evening--it was late in September, 1937--he did not go
home to dinner at all but, with a paper container of coffee and a
slab of pie untouched before him, he stooped at his desk in the
Informer office, writing an editorial which, when he had
finished it, he marked: "Must. 12-pt bold face--box top front
p."

The beginning of the editorial, to appear the following
morning was:

Believing that the inefficiency and crimes of the Corpo
administration were due to the difficulties attending a new form
of government, we have waited patiently for their end. We
apologize to our readers for that patience.

It is easy to see now, in the revolting crime of a drunken
cabinet member against two innocent and valuable old men like Dr.
Schmidt and the Rev. Dr. de Verez, that we may expect nothing but
murderous extirpation of all honest opponents of the tyranny of
Windrip and his Corpo gang.

Not that all of them are as vicious as Macgoblin. Some are
merely incompetent--like our friends Ledue, Reek, and Haik. But
their ludicrous incapability permits the homicidal cruelty of
their chieftains to go on without check.

Buzzard Windrip, the "Chief," and his pirate gang--

A smallish, neat, gray-bearded man, furiously rattling an aged
typewriter, typing with his two forefingers.

Dan Wilgus, head of the composing room, looked and barked like
an old sergeant and, like an old sergeant, was only theoretically
meek to his superior officer. He was shaking when he brought in
this copy and, almost rubbing Doremus's nose in it, protested,
"Say, boss, you don't honest t' God think we're going to set this
up, do you?"

"I certainly do!"

"Well, I don't! Rattlesnake poison! It's all right your
getting thrown in the hoosegow and probably shot at dawn, if you
like that kind of sport, but we've held a meeting of the chapel,
and we all say, damned if we'll risk our necks too!"

"All right, you yellow pup! All right, Dan, I'll set it
myself!"

"Aw, don't! Gosh, I don't want to have to go to your funeral
after the M.M.'s get through with you, and say, 'Don't he look
unnatural!'"

"After working for me for twenty years, Dan! Traitor!"

"Look here! I'm no Enoch Arden or--oh, what the hell was his
name?--Ethan Frome or Benedict Arnold or whatever it was!--and
more 'n once I've licked some galoot that was standing around a
saloon telling the world you were the lousiest highbrow editor in
Vermont, and at that, I guess maybe he was telling the truth, but
same time--" Dan's effort to be humorous and coaxing broke, and
he wailed, "God, boss, please don't!"

"I know, Dan. Prob'ly our friend Shad Ledue will be annoyed.
But I can't go on standing things like slaughtering old De Verez
any more and--Here! Gimme that copy!"

While compositors, pressmen, and the young devil stood
alternately fretting and snickering at his clumsiness, Doremus
ranged up before a type case, in his left hand the first
composing-stick he had held in ten years, and looked doubtfully
at the case. It was like a labyrinth to him. "Forgot how it's
arranged. Can't find anything except the e-box!" he
complained.

"Hell! I'll do it! All you pussyfooters get the hell out of
this! You don't know one doggone thing about who set this up!"
Dan Wilgus roared, and the other printers vanished!--as far as
the toilet door.

In the editorial office, Doremus showed proofs of his
indiscretion to Doc Itchitt, that enterprising though awkward
reporter, and to Julian Falck, who was off now to Amherst but who
had been working for the Informer all summer, combining
unprintable articles on Adam Smith with extremely printable
accounts of golf and dances at the country club.

"Gee, I hope you will have the nerve to go on and print
it--and same time, I hope you don't! They'll get you!" worried
Julian.

"Naw! Gwan and print it! They won't dare to do a thing! They
may get funny in New York and Washington, but you're too strong
in the Beulah Valley for Ledue and Staubmeyer to dare lift a
hand!" brayed Doc Itchitt, while Doremus considered, "I wonder if
this smart young journalistic Judas wouldn't like to see me in
trouble and get hold of the Informer and turn it
Corpo?"

He did not stay at the office till the paper with his
editorial had gone to press. He went home early, and showed the
proof to Emma and Sissy. While they were reading it, with yelps
of disapproval, Julian Falck slipped in.

Emma protested, "Oh, you can't--you mustn't do it! What will
become of us all? Honestly, Dormouse, I'm not scared for myself,
but what would I do if they beat you or put you in prison or
something? It would just break my heart to think of you in a
cell! And without any clean underclothes! It isn't too late to
stop it, is it?"

"No. As a matter of fact the paper doesn't go to bed till
eleven. . . . Sissy, what do you think?"

"I don't know what to think! Oh damn!"

"Why Sis-sy," from Emma, quite mechanically.

"It used to be, you did what was right and got a nice stick of
candy for it," said Sissy. "Now, it seems as if whatever's right
is wrong. Julian--funny-face--what do you think of Pop's kicking
Shad in his sweet hairy ears?"

"Why, Sis--"

Julian blurted, "I think it'd be fierce if somebody didn't try
to stop these fellows. I wish I could do it. But how could
I?"

"You've probably answered the whole business," said Doremus.
"If a man is going to assume the right to tell several thousand
readers what's what--most agreeable, hitherto--he's got a kind of
you might say priestly obligation to tell the truth. 'O cursed
spite.' Well! I think I'll drop into the office again. Home about
midnight. Don't sit up, anybody--and Sissy, and you, Julian, that
particularly goes for you two night prowlers! As for me and my
house, we will serve the Lord--and in Vermont, that means going
to bed."

"And alone!" murmured Sissy.

"Why--Cecilia--Jes-sup!"

As Doremus trotted out, Foolish, who had sat adoring him,
jumped up, hoping for a run.

Somehow, more than all of Emma's imploring, the dog's familiar
devotion made Doremus feel what it might be to go to prison.

He had lied. He did not return to the office. He drove up the
valley to the Tavern and to Lorinda Pike.

But on the way he stopped in at the home of his son-in-law,
bustling young Dr. Fowler Greenhill; not to show him the proof
but to have--perhaps in prison?--another memory of the domestic
life in which he had been rich. He stepped quietly into the front
hall of the Greenhill house--a jaunty imitation of Mount Vernon;
very prosperous and secure, gay with the brass-knobbed walnut
furniture and painted Russian boxes which Mary Greenhill
affected. Doremus could hear David (but surely it was past his
bedtime?--what time did nine-year-old kids go to bed these
degenerate days?) excitedly chattering with his father, and his
father's partner, old Dr. Marcus Olmsted, who was almost retired
but who kept up the obstetrics and eye-and-ear work for the
firm.

Doremus peeped into the living room, with its bright curtains
of yellow linen. David's mother was writing letters, a crisp,
fashionable figure at a maple desk complete with yellow quill
pen, engraved notepaper, and silver-backed blotter. Fowler and
David were lounging on the two wide arms of Dr. Olmsted's
chair.

"So you don't think you'll be a doctor, like your dad and me?"
Dr. Olmsted was quizzing.

David's soft hair fluttered as he bobbed his head in the
agitation of being taken seriously by grown-ups.

"Oh--oh--oh yes, I would like to. Oh, I think it'd be slick to
be a doctor. But I want to be a newspaper, like Granddad. That'd
be a wow! You said it!"

("Da-vid! Where you ever pick up such language!")

"You see, Uncle-Doctor, a doctor, oh gee, he has to stay up
all night, but an editor, he just sits in his office and takes it
easy and never has to worry about nothing!"

That moment, Fowler Greenhill saw his father-in-law making
monkey faces at him from the door and admonished David, "Now, not
always! Editors have to work pretty hard sometimes--just think of
when there's train wrecks and floods and everything! I'll tell
you. Did you know I have magic power?"

"What's 'magic power,' Daddy?"

"I'll show you. I'll summon your granddad here from misty
deeps--"

("But will he come?" grunted Dr. Olmsted.)

"--and have him tell you all the troubles an editor has. Just
make him come flying through the air!"

And there, coming through the doorway, sure enough was
Granddad Jessup!

Doremus remained only ten minutes, saying to himself, "Anyway,
nothing bad can happen here, in this solid household." When
Fowler saw him to the door, Doremus sighed to him, "Wish Davy
were right--just had to sit in the office and not worry. But I
suppose some day I'll have a run-in with the Corpos."

"I hope not. Nasty bunch. What do you think, Dad? That swine
Shad Ledue told me yesterday they wanted me to join the M.M.'s as
medical officer. Fat chance! I told him so."

"Watch out for Shad, Fowler. He's vindictive. Made us rewire
our whole building."

"I'm not scared of Captain General Ledue or fifty like him!
Hope he calls me in for a bellyache some day! I'll give him a
good sedative--potassium of cyanide. Maybe I'll some day have the
pleasure of seeing that gent in his coffin. That's the advantage
the doctor has, you know! G'-night, Dad! Sleep tight!"

A good many tourists were still coming up from New York to
view the colored autumn of Vermont, and when Doremus arrived at
the Beulah Valley Tavern he had irritably to wait while Lorinda
dug out extra towels and looked up tram schedules and was polite
to old ladies who complained that there was too much--or not
enough--sound from the Beulah River Falls at night. He could not
talk to her apart until after ten. There was, meanwhile, a
curious exalted luxury in watching each lost minute threaten him
with the approach of the final press time, as he sat in the tea
room, imperturbably scratching through the leaves of the latest
Fortune.

Lorinda led him, at ten-fifteen, into her little office--just
a roll-top desk, a desk chair, one straight chair, and a table
piled with heaps of defunct hotel-magazines. It was spinsterishly
neat yet smelled still of the cigar smoke and old letter files of
proprietors long since gone.

"Let's hurry, Dor. I'm having a little dust-up with that snipe
Nipper." She plumped down at the desk.

He himself took the desk chair and pulled her down on his
knees. "Oh, you!" she snorted, but she nuzzled her cheek
against his shoulder and murmured contentedly.

"Read this, Linda. For tomorrow's paper. I think I'm going to
publish it, all right--got to decide finally before eleven--but
ought I to? I was sure when I left the office, but Emma was
scared--"

"Oh, Emma! Sit still. Let me see it." She read quickly.
She always did. At the end she said emotionlessly, "Yes. You must
run it. Doremus! They've actually come to us here--the
Corpos--it's like reading about typhus in China and suddenly
finding it in your own house!"

She rubbed his shoulder with her cheek again, and raged,
"Think of it! That Shad Ledue--and I taught him for a year in
district school, though I was only two years older than he
was--and what a nasty bully he was, too! He came to me a few days
ago, and he had the nerve to propose that if I would give lower
rates to the M.M.'s--he sort of hinted it would be nice of me to
serve M.M. officers free--they would close their eyes to my
selling liquor here, without a license or anything! Why, he had
the inconceivable nerve to tell me, and condescendingly!
my dear--that he and his fine friends would be willing to hang
out here a lot! Even Staubmeyer--oh, our 'professor' is
blossoming out as quite a sporting character! And when I chased
Ledue out, with a flea in his ear--Well, just this morning I got
a notice that I have to appear in the county court tomorrow--some
complaint from my endearing partner, Mr. Nipper--seems he isn't
satisfied with the division of our work here--and honestly, my
darling, he never does one blame thing but sit around and bore my
best customers to death by telling what a swell hotel he used to
have in Florida. And Nipper has taken his things out of here and
moved into town. I'm afraid I'll have an unpleasant time, trying
to keep from telling him what I think of him, in court."

"You'd better. The Corpos are using the courts for all sorts
of graft and for accusations of sedition. Get Mungo Kitterick, my
lawyer."

"He's dumb. Ice water in his veins."

"I know, but he's a tidier-up, like so many lawyers. Likes to
see everything all neat in pigeonholes. He may not care a damn
for justice, but he'll be awfully pained by any irregularities.
Please get him, Lindy, because they've got Effingham Swan
presiding at court tomorrow."

"Who?"

"Swan--the Military Judge for District Three--that's a new
Corpo office. Kind of circuit judge with court-martial powers.
This Effingham Swan--I had Doc Itchitt interview him today, when
he arrived--he's the perfect gentleman-Fascist--Oswald Mosley
style. Good family--whatever that means. Harvard graduate.
Columbia Law School, year at Oxford. But went into finance in
Boston. Investment banker. Major or something during the war.
Plays polo and sailed in a yacht race to Bermuda. Itchitt says
he's a big brute, with manners smoother than a butterscotch
sundae and more language than a bishop."

"But I'll be glad to have a gentleman to explain things
to, instead of Shad."

"A gentleman's blackjack hurts just as much as a
mucker's!"

"Oh, you!" with irritated tenderness, running her
forefinger along the line of his jaw.

Outside, a footstep.

She sprang up, sat down primly in the straight chair. The
footsteps went by. She mused:

"All this trouble and the Corpos--They're going to do
something to you and me. We'll become so roused up that--either
we'll be desperate and really cling to each other and everybody
else in the world can go to the devil or, what I'm afraid is more
likely, we'll get so deep into rebellion against Windrip, we'll
feel so terribly that we're standing for something, that we'll
want to give up everything else for it, even give up you and me.
So that no one can ever find out and criticize. We'll have to be
beyond criticism."

"No! I won't listen. We will fight, but how can we ever get so
involved--detached people like us--"

"You are going to publish that editorial tomorrow?"

"Yes."

"It's not too late to kill it?"

He looked at the clock over her desk--so ludicrously like a
grade-school clock that it ought to have been flanked with
portraits of George and Martha. "Well, yes, it is too
late--almost eleven. Couldn't get to the office till 'way
past."

"You're sure you won't worry about it when you go to bed
tonight? Dear, I so don't want you to worry! You're sure you
don't want to telephone and kill the editorial?"

She kissed him and hurried off to another hour or two of work,
while he drove home, whistling vaingloriously.

But he did not sleep well, in his big black-walnut bed. He
startled to the night noises of an old frame house--the easing
walls, the step of bodiless assassins creeping across the wooden
floors all night long.

19

An honest propagandist for any Cause, that is, one who
honestly studies and figures out the most effective way of
putting over his Message, will learn fairly early that it is not
fair to ordinary folks--it just confuses them--to try to make
them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a
higher class of people. And one seemingly small but almighty
important point he learns, if he does much speechifying, is that
you can win over folks to your point of view much better in the
evening, when they are tired out from work and not so likely to
resist you, than at any other time of day.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

The Fort Beulah Informer had its own three-story-and
basement building, on President Street between Elm and Maple,
opposite the side entrance of the Hotel Wessex. On the top story
was the composing room; on the second, the editorial and
photographic departments and the bookkeeper; in the basement, the
presses; and on the first or street floor, the circulation and
advertising departments, and the front office, open to the
pavement, where the public came to pay subscriptions and insert
want-ads. The private room of the editor, Doremus Jessup, looked
out on President Street through one not too dirty window. It was
larger but little more showy than Lorinda Pike's office at the
Tavern, but on the wall it did have historic treasures in the way
of a water-stained surveyor's-map of Fort Beulah Township in
1891, a contemporary oleograph portrait of President McKinley,
complete with eagles, flags, cannon, and the Ohio state flower,
the scarlet carnation, a group photograph of the New England
Editorial Association (in which Doremus was the third blur in a
derby hat in the fourth row), and an entirely bogus copy of a
newspaper announcing Lincoln's death. It was reasonably tidy--in
the patent letter file, otherwise empty, there were only 2 1/2
pairs of winter mittens, and an 18-gauge shotgun shell.

Doremus was, by habit, extremely fond of his office. It was
the only place aside from his study at home that was thoroughly
his own. He would have hated to leave it or to share it with
anyone--possibly excepting Buck and Lorinda--and every morning he
came to it expectantly, from the ground floor, up the wide brown
stairs, through the good smell of printer's ink.

He stood at the window of this room before eight, the morning
when his editorial appeared, looking down at the people going to
work in shops and warehouses. A few of them were in Minute Men
uniforms. More and more even the part-time M.M.'s wore their
uniforms when on civilian duties. There was a bustle among them.
He saw them unfold copies of the Informer; he saw them
look up, point up, at his window. Heads close, they irritably
discussed the front page of the paper. R. C. Crowley went by,
early as ever on his way to open the bank, and stopped to speak
to a clerk from Ed Howland's grocery, both of them shaking their
heads. Old Dr. Olmsted, Fowler's partner, and Louis Rotenstern
halted on a corner. Doremus knew they were both friends of his,
but they were dubious, perhaps frightened, as they looked at an
Informer.

The passing of people became a gathering, the gathering a
crowd, the crowd a mob, glaring up at his office, beginning to
clamor. There were dozens of people there unknown to him:
respectable farmers in town for shopping, unrespectables in town
for a drink, laborers from the nearest work camp, and all of them
eddying around M.M. uniforms. Probably many of them cared nothing
about insults to the Corpo state, but had only the unprejudiced,
impersonal pleasure in violence natural to most people.

Their mutter became louder, less human, more like the snap of
burning rafters. Their glances joined in one. He was, frankly,
scared.

He was half conscious of big Dan Wilgus, the head compositor,
beside him, hand on his shoulder, but saying nothing, and of Doc
Itchitt cackling, "My--my gracious--hope they don't--God, I hope
they don't come up here!"

The mob acted then, swift and together, on no more of an
incitement than an unknown M.M.'s shout: "Ought to burn the
place, lynch the whole bunch of traitors!" They were running
across the street, into the front office. He could hear a sound
of smashing, and his fright was gone in protective fury. He
galloped down the wide stairs, and from five steps above the
front office looked on the mob, equipped with axes and brush
hooks grabbed from in front of Pridewell's near-by hardware
store, slashing at the counter facing the front door, breaking
the glass case of souvenir postcards and stationery samples, and
with obscene hands reaching across the counter to rip the blouse
of the girl clerk.

Doremus cried, "Get out of this, all you bums!"

They were coming toward him, claws hideously opening and
closing, but he did not await that coming. He clumped down the
stairs, step by step, trembling not from fear but from insane
anger. One large burgher seized his arm, began to bend it. The
pain was atrocious. At that moment (Doremus almost smiled, so
grotesquely was it like the nick-of-time rescue by the landing
party of Marines) into the front office Commissioner Shad Ledue
marched, at the head of twenty M.M.'s with unsheathed bayonets,
and, lumpishly climbing up on the shattered counter,
bellowed:

"That'll do from you guys! Lam out of this, the whole damn
bunch of you!"

Doremus's assailant had dropped his arm. Was he actually,
wondered Doremus, to be warmly indebted to Commissioner Ledue, to
Shad Ledue? Such a powerful, dependable fellow--the dirty
swine!

Shad roared on: "We're not going to bust up this place. Jessup
sure deserves lynching, but we got orders from Hanover--the
Corpos are going to take over this plant and use it. Beat it,
you!"

A wild woman from the mountains--in another existence she had
knitted at the guillotine--had thrust through to the counter and
was howling up at Shad, "They're traitors! Hang 'em! We'll hang
you, if you stop us! I want my five thousand dollars!"

Shad casually stooped down from the counter and slapped her.
Doremus felt his muscles tense with the effort to get at Shad, to
revenge the good lady who, after all, had as much right as Shad
to slaughter him, but he relaxed, impatiently gave up all desire
for mock heroism. The bayonets of the M.M.'s who were clearing
out the crowd were reality, not to be attacked by hysteria.

Shad, from the counter, was blatting in a voice like a
sawmill, "Snap into it, Jessup! Take him along, men."

And Doremus, with no volition whatever, was marching through
President Street, up Elm Street, and toward the courthouse and
county jail, surrounded by four armed Minute Men. The strangest
thing about it, he reflected was that a man could go off thus, on
an uncharted journey which might take years, without fussing over
plans and tickets, without baggage, without even an extra clean
handkerchief, without letting Emma know where he was going,
without letting Lorinda--oh, Lorinda could take care of herself.
But Emma would worry.

He realized that the guard beside him, with the chevrons of a
squad leader, or corporal, was Aras Dilley, the slatternly farmer
from up on Mount Terror whom he had often helped . . . or thought
he had helped.

"Ah, Aras!" said he.

"Huh!" said Aras.

"Come on! Shut up and keep moving!" said the M.M. behind
Doremus, and prodded him with the bayonet.

It did not, actually, hurt much, but Doremus spat with fury.
So long now he had unconsciously assumed that his dignity, his
body, were sacred. Ribald Death might touch him, but no more
vulgar stranger.

Not till they had almost reached the courthouse could he
realize that people were looking at him--at Doremus Jessup!--as a
prisoner being taken to jail. He tried to be proud of being a
political prisoner. He couldn't. Jail was jail.

The county lockup was at the back of the courthouse, now the
center of Ledue's headquarters. Doremus had never been in that or
any other jail except as a reporter, pityingly interviewing the
curious, inferior sort of people who did mysteriously get
themselves arrested.

To go into that shameful back door--he who had always stalked
into the front entrance of the courthouse, the editor, saluted by
clerk and sheriff and judge!

Shad was not in sight. Silently Doremus's four guards
conducted him through a steel door, down a corridor, to a small
cell reeking of chloride of lime and, still unspeaking, they left
him there. The cell had a cot with a damp straw mattress and
damper straw pillow, a stool, a wash basin with one tap for cold
water, a pot, two hooks for clothes, a small barred window, and
nothing else whatever except a jaunty sign ornamented with
embossed forget-me-nots and a text from Deuteronomy, "He shall be
free at home one year."

"I hope so!" said Doremus, not very cordially.

It was before nine in the morning. He remained in that cell,
without speech, without food, with only tap water caught in his
doubled palm and with one cigarette an hour, until after
midnight, and in the unaccustomed stillness he saw how in prison
men could eventually go mad.

"Don't whine, though. You here a few hours, and plenty of poor
devils in solitary for years and years, put there by tyrants
worse than Windrip . . . yes, and sometimes put there by nice,
good, social-minded judges that I've played bridge with!"

But the reasonableness of the thought didn't particularly
cheer him.

He could hear a distant babble from the bull pen, where the
drunks and vagrants, and the petty offenders among the M.M.'s,
were crowded in enviable comradeship, but the sound was only a
background for the corroding stillness.

He sank into a twitching numbness. He felt that he was
choking, and gasped desperately. Only now and then did he think
clearly--then only of the shame of imprisonment or, even more
emphatically, of how hard the wooden stool was on his
ill-upholstered rump, and how much pleasanter it was, even so,
than the cot, whose mattress had the quality of crushed
worms.

Once he felt that he saw the way clearly:

"The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of
Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It's
the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious,
respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the
demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.

"A few months ago I thought the slaughter of the Civil War,
and the agitation of the violent Abolitionists who helped bring
it on, were evil. But possibly they had to be violent,
because easy-going citizens like me couldn't be stirred up
otherwise. If our grandfathers had had the alertness and courage
to see the evils of slavery and of a government conducted by
gentlemen for gentlemen only, there wouldn't have been any need
of agitators and war and blood.

"It's my sort, the Responsible Citizens who've felt ourselves
superior because we've been well-to-do and what we thought was
'educated,' who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution,
and now the Fascist Dictatorship. It's I who murdered Rabbi de
Verez. It's I who persecuted the Jews and the Negroes. I can
blame no Aras Dilley, no Shad Ledue, no Buzz Windrip, but only my
own timid soul and drowsy mind. Forgive, O Lord!

"Is it too late?"

Once again, as darkness was coming into his cell like the
inescapable ooze of a flood, he thought furiously:

"And about Lorinda. Now that I've been kicked into
reality--got to be one thing or the other: Emma (who's my bread)
or Lorinda (my wine) but I can't have both.

"Oh, damn! What twaddle! Why can't a man have both bread and
wine and not prefer one before the other?

"Unless, maybe, we're all coming into a day of battles when
the fighting will be too hot to let a man stop for anything save
bread . . . and maybe, even, too hot to let him stop for
that!"

The waiting--the waiting in the smothering cell--the
relentless waiting while the filthy window glass turned from
afternoon to a bleak darkness.

What was happening out there? What had happened to Emma, to
Lorinda, to the Informer office, to Dan Wilgus, to Buck
and Sissy and Mary and David?

Why, it was today that Lorinda was to answer the action
against her by Nipper! Today! (Surely all that must have been
done with a year ago!) What had happened? Had Military Judge
Effingham Swan treated her as she deserved?

But Doremus slipped again from this living agitation into the
trance of waiting--waiting; and, catnapping on the hideously
uncomfortable little stool, he was dazed when at some unholily
late hour (it was just after midnight) he was aroused by the
presence of armed M.M.'s outside his barred cell door, and by the
hill-billy drawl of Squad Leader Aras Dilley:

Doremus was escorted through angling corridors to the familiar
side entrance of the courtroom--the entrance where once he had
seen Thad Dilley, Aras's degenerate cousin, shamble in to receive
sentence for clubbing his wife to death. . . . He could not keep
from feeling that Thad and he were kin, now.

He was kept waiting--waiting!--for a quarter hour outside the
closed courtroom door. He had time to consider the three guards
commanded by Squad Leader Aras. He happened to know that one of
them had served a sentence at Windsor for robbery with assault;
and one, a surly young farmer, had been rather doubtfully
acquitted on a charge of barn-burning in revenge against a
neighbor.

He leaned against the slightly dirty gray plaster wall of the
corridor.

"Stand straight there, you! What the hell do you think this
is? And keeping us up late like this!" said the rejuvenated, the
redeemed Aras, waggling his bayonet and shining with desire to
use it on the bourjui.

Doremus stood straight.

He stood very straight, he stood rigid, beneath a portrait of
Horace Greeley.

Till now, Doremus had liked to think of that most famous of
radical editors, who had been a printer in Vermont from 1825 to
1828, as his colleague and comrade. Now he felt colleague only to
the revolutionary Karl Pascals.

His legs, not too young, were trembling; his calves ached. Was
he going to faint? What was happening in there, in the
courtroom?

To save himself from the disgrace of collapsing, he studied
Aras Dilley. Though his uniform was fairly new, Aras had managed
to deal with it as his family and he had dealt with their house
on Mount Terror--once a sturdy Vermont cottage with shining white
clapboards, now mud-smeared and rotting. His cap was crushed in,
his breeches spotted, his leggings gaping, and one tunic button
hung by a thread.

"I wouldn't particularly want to be dictator over an Aras, but
I most particularly do not want him and his like to be dictators
over me, whether they call them Fascists or Corpos or Communists
or Monarchists or Free Democratic Electors or anything else! If
that makes me a reactionary kulak, all right! I don't believe I
ever really liked the shiftless brethren, for all my lying
hand-shaking. Do you think the Lord calls on us to love the
cowbirds as much as the swallows? I don't! Oh, I know; Aras has
had a hard time: mortgage and seven kids. But Cousin Henry Veeder
and Dan Wilgus--yes, and Pete Vutong, the Canuck, that lives
right across the road from Aras and has just exactly the same
kind of land--they were all born poor, and they've lived decently
enough. They can wash their ears and their door sills, at least.
I'm cursed if I'm going to give up the American-Wesleyan doctrine
of Free Will and of Will to Accomplishment entirely, even if it
does get me read out of the Liberal Communion!"

Aras had peeped into the courtroom, and he stood giggling.

Then Lorinda came out--after midnight!

Her partner, the wart Nipper, was following her, looking
sheepishly triumphant.

"Linda! Linda!" called Doremus, his hands out, ignoring the
snickers of the curious guards, trying to move toward her. Aras
pushed him back and at Lorinda sneered, "Go on--move on, there!"
and she moved. She seemed twisted and rusty as Doremus would have
thought her bright steeliness could never have been.

Aras cackled, "Haa, haa, haa! Your friend, Sister Pike--"

"My wife's friend!"

"All right, boss. Have it your way! Your wife's friend, Sister
Pike, got hers for trying to be fresh with Judge Swan! She's been
kicked out of her partnership with Mr. Nipper--he's going to
manage that Tavern of theirn, and Sister Pike goes back to
pot-walloping in the kitchen, like she'd ought to!--like maybe
some of your womenfolks, that think they're so almighty stylish
and independent, will be having to, pretty soon!"

Again Doremus had sense enough to regard the bayonets; and a
mighty voice from inside the courtroom trumpeted: "Next case! D.
Jessup!"

On the judges' bench were Shad Ledue in uniform as an M.M.
battalion leader, ex-superintendent Emil Staubmeyer presenting
the rôle of ensign, and a third man, tall, rather handsome,
rather too face-massaged, with the letters "M.J." on the collar
of his uniform as commander, or pseudo-colonel. He was perhaps
fifteen years younger than Doremus.

This, Doremus knew, must be Military Judge Effingham Swan,
sometime of Boston.

The Minute Men marched him in front of the bench and retired,
with only two of them, a milky-faced farm boy and a former
gas-station attendant, remaining on guard inside the double doors
of the side entrance . . . the entrance for criminals.

Commander Swan loafed to his feet and, as though he were
greeting his oldest friend, cooed at Doremus, "My dear fellow, so
sorry to have to trouble you. Just a routine query, you know. Do
sit down. Gentlemen, in the case of Mr. Doremus, surely we need
not go through the farce of formal inquiry. Let's all sit about
that damn big silly table down there--place where they always
stick the innocent defendants and the guilty attorneys, y'
know--get down from this high altar--little too mystical for the
taste of a vulgar bucket-shop gambler like myself. After you,
Professor; after you, my dear Captain." And, to the guards, "Just
wait outside in the hall, will you? Close the doors."

Staubmeyer and Shad looking, despite Effingham Swan's
frivolity, as portentous as their uniforms could make them,
clumped down to the table. Swan followed them airily, and to
Doremus, still standing, he gave his tortoise-shell cigarette
case, caroling, "Do have a smoke, Mr. Doremus. Must we all be so
painfully formal?"

Doremus reluctantly took a cigarette, reluctantly sat down as
Swan waved him to a chair--with something not quite so airy and
affable in the sharpness of the gesture.

"My name is Jessup, Commander. Doremus is my first name."

"Ah, I see. It could be. Quite so. Very New England. Doremus."
Swan was leaning back in his wooden armchair, powerful trim hands
behind his neck. "I'll tell you, my dear fellow. One's memory is
so wretched, you know. I'll just call you 'Doremus,' sans
Mister. Then, d' you see, it might apply to either the first (or
Christian, as I believe one's wretched people in Back Bay insist
on calling it)--either the Christian or the surname. Then we
shall feel all friendly and secure. Now, Doremus, my dear fellow,
I begged my friends in the M.M.--I do trust they were not too
importunate, as these parochial units sometimes do seem to
be--but I ordered them to invite you here, really, just to get
your advice as a journalist. Does it seem to you that most of the
peasants here are coming to their senses and ready to accept the
Corpo fait accompli?"

Doremus grumbled, "But I understood I was dragged here--and if
you want to know, your squad was all of what you call
'importunate'!--because of an editorial I wrote about President
Windrip."

"Oh, was that you, Doremus? You see?--I was right--one does
have such a wretched memory! I do seem now to remember some minor
incident of the sort--you know--mentioned in the agenda. Do have
another cigarette, my dear fellow."

"Swan! I don't care much for this cat-and-mouse game--at
least, not while I'm the mouse. What are your charges against
me?"

"Charges? Oh, my only aunt! Just trifling things--criminal
libel and conveying secret information to alien forces and high
treason and homicidal incitement to violence--you know, the usual
boresome line. And all so easily got rid of, my Doremus, if you'd
just be persuaded--you see how quite pitifully eager I am to be
friendly with you, and to have the inestimable aid of your
experience here--if you'd just decide that it might be the part
of discretion--so suitable, y' know, to your venerable
years--"

"Damn it, I'm not venerable, nor anything like it. Only sixty.
Sixty-one, I should say."

"Matter of ratio, my dear fellow. I'm forty-seven m'self, and
I have no doubt the young pups already call me venerable!
But as I was saying, Doremus--"

(Why was it he winced with fury every time Swan called him
that?)

"--with your position as one of the Council of Elders, and
with your responsibilities to your family--it would be too
sick-making if anything happened to them, y' know!--you
just can't afford to be too brash! And all we desire is for you
to play along with us in your paper--I would adore the chance of
explaining some of the Corpos' and the Chief's still unrevealed
plans to you. You'd see such a new light!"

Shad grunted, "Him? Jessup couldn't see a new light if it was
on the end of his nose!"

"A moment, my dear Captain. . . . And also, Doremus, of course
we shall urge you to help us by giving us a complete list of
every person in this vicinity that you know of who is secretly
opposed to the Administration."

"Spying? Me?"

"Quite!"

"If I'm accused of--I insist on having my lawyer, Mungo
Kitterick, and on being tried, not all this bear-baiting--"

"Quaint name. Mungo Kitterick! Oh, my only aunt! Why does it
give me so absurd a picture of an explorer with a Greek grammar
in his hand? You don't quite understand, my Doremus. Habeas
corpus--due processes of law--too, too bad!--all those
ancient sanctities, dating, no doubt, from Magna Charta, been
suspended--oh, but just temporarily, y' know--state of
crisis--unfortunate necessity martial law--"

"You know mighty well and good it isn't temporary! It's
permanent--that is, as long as the Corpos last."

"It could be!"

"Swan--Commander--you get that 'it could be' and 'my aunt'
from the Reggie Fortune stories, don't you?"

"Now there is a fellow detective-story fanatic! But how
too bogus!"

"And that's Evelyn Waugh! You're quite a literary man for so
famous a yachtsman and horseman, Commander."

"Horsemun, yachtsmun, lit-er-ary man! Am I, Doremus,
even in my sanctum sanctorum, having, as the lesser breeds
would say, the pants kidded off me? Oh, my Doremus, that couldn't
be! And just when one is so feeble, after having been so, shall I
say excoriated, by your so amiable friend, Mrs. Lorinda Pike? No,
no! How too unbefitting the majesty of the law!"

Shad interrupted again, "Yeh, we had a swell time with your
girl-friend, Jessup. But I already had the dope about you and her
before."

Doremus sprang up, his chair crashing backward on the floor.
He was reaching for Shad's throat across the table. Effingham
Swan was on him, pushing him back into another chair. Doremus
hiccuped with fury. Shad had not even troubled to rise, and he
was going on contemptuously:

"Yuh, you two'll have quite some trouble if you try to pull
any spy stuff on the Corpos. My, my, Doremus, ain't we had fun,
Lindy and you, playing footie-footie these last couple years!
Didn't nobody know about it, did they! But what you didn't
know was Lindy--and don't it beat hell a long-nosed, skinny old
maid like her can have so much pep!--and she's been cheating on
you right along, sleeping with every doggone man boarder she's
had at the Tavern, and of course with her little squirt of a
partner, Nipper!"

Swan's great hand--hand of an ape with a manicure--held
Doremus in his chair. Shad snickered. Emil Staubmeyer, who had
been sitting with fingertips together, laughed amiably. Swan
patted Doremus's back.

He was less sunken by the insult to Lorinda than by the
feeling of helpless loneliness. It was so late; the night so
quiet. He would have been glad if even the M.M. guards had come
in from the hall. Their rustic innocence, however barnyardishly
brutal, would have been comforting after the easy viciousness of
the three judges.

Swan was placidly resuming: "But I suppose we really must get
down to business--however agreeable, my dear clever literary
detective, it would be to discuss Agatha Christie and Dorothy
Sayers and Norman Klein. Perhaps we can some day, when the Chief
puts us both in the same prison! There's really, my dear Doremus,
no need of your troubling your legal gentleman, Mr. Monkey
Kitteridge. I am quite authorized to conduct this trial--for
quaintly enough, Doremus, it is a trial, despite the
delightful St. Botolph's atmosphere! And as to testimony, I
already have all I need, both in the good Miss Lorinda's
inadvertent admissions, in the actual text of your editorial
criticizing the Chief, and in the quite thorough reports of
Captain Ledue and Dr. Staubmeyer. One really ought to take you
out and shoot you--and one is quite empowered to do so, oh
quite!--but one has one's faults--one is really too merciful. And
perhaps we can find a better use for you than as fertilizer--you
are, you know, rather too much on the skinny side to make
adequate fertilizer.

"You are to be released on parole, to assist and coach Dr.
Staubmeyer who, by orders from Commissioner Reek, at Hanover, has
just been made editor of the Informer, but who doubtless
lacks certain points of technical training. You will help
him--oh, gladly, I am sure!--until he learns. Then we'll see what
we'll do with you! . . . You will write editorials, with all your
accustomed brilliance--oh, I assure you, people constantly stop
on Boston Common to discuss your masterpieces; have done for
years! But you'll write only as Dr. Staubmeyer tells you.
Understand? Oh. Today--since 'tis already past the
witching hour--you will write an abject apology for your
diatribe--oh yes, very much on the abject side! You know--you
veteran journalists do these things so neatly--just admit you
were a cockeyed liar and that sort of thing--bright and
bantering--you know! And next Monday you will, like most
of the other ditchwater-dull hick papers, begin the serial
publication of the Chief's Zero Hour. You'll enjoy
that!"

Clatter and shouts at the door. Protests from the unseen
guards. Dr. Fowler Greenhill pounding in, stopping with arms
akimbo, shouting as he strode down to the table, "What do you
three comic judges think you're doing?"

"Doc Fowler--Jessup's son-in-law. And a bad actor! Why, couple
days ago I offered him charge of medical inspection for all the
M.M.'s in the county, and he said--this red-headed smart aleck
here!--he said you and me and Commissioner Reek and Doc
Staubmeyer and all of us were a bunch of hoboes that 'd be
digging ditches in a labor camp if we hadn't stole some officers'
uniforms!"

"Ah, did he indeed?" purred Swan.

Fowler protested: "He's a liar. I never mentioned you. I don't
even know who you are."

"My name, good sir, is Commander Effingham Swan, M.J.!"

"Well, M. J., that still doesn't enlighten me. Never heard of
you!"

Shad interrupted, "How the hell did you get past the guards,
Fowley?" (He who had never dared call that long-reaching,
swift-moving redhead anything more familiar than "Doc.")

"Oh, all your Minnie Mouses know me. I've treated most of your
brightest gunmen for unmentionable diseases. I just told them at
the door that I was wanted in here professionally."

Swan was at his silkiest: "Oh, and how we did want you,
my dear fellow--though we didn't know it until this moment. So
you are one of these brave rustic Æsculapiuses?"

"I am! And if you were in the war--which I should doubt, from
your pansy way of talking--you may be interested to know that I
am also a member of the American Legion--quit Harvard and joined
up in 1918 and went back afterwards to finish. And I want to warn
you three half-baked Hitlers--"

"Ah! But my dear friend! A mil-i-tary man! How too too!
Then we shall have to treat you as a responsible
person--responsible for your idiocies--not just as the uncouth
clodhopper that you appear!"

Fowler was leaning both fists on the table. "Now I've had
enough! I'm going to push in your booful face--"

Shad had his fists up, was rounding the table, but Swan
snapped, "No! Let him finish! He may enjoy digging his own grave.
You know--people do have such quaint variant notions about
sports. Some laddies actually like to go fishing--all those slimy
scales and the shocking odor! By the way, Doctor, before it's too
late, I would like to leave with you the thought for the day that
I was also in the war to end wars--a major. But go on. I do so
want to listen to you yet a little."

"Cut the cackle, will you, M. J.? I've just come here to tell
you that I've had enough--everybody's had enough--of your
kidnaping Mr. Jessup--the most honest and useful man in the whole
Beulah Valley! Typical low-down sneaking kidnapers! If you think
your phony Rhodes-Scholar accent keeps you from being just
another cowardly, murdering Public Enemy, in your toy-soldier
uniform--"

Swan held up his hand in his most genteel Back Bay manner. "A
moment, Doctor, if you will be so good?" And to Shad: "I should
think we'd heard enough from the Comrade, wouldn't you,
Commissioner? Just take the bastard out and shoot him."

"O.K.! Swell!" Shad chuckled; and, to the guards at the
half-open door, "Get the corporal of the guard and a squad--six
men--loaded rifles--make it snappy, see?"

The guard were not far down the corridor, and their rifles
were already loaded. It was in less than a minute that Aras
Dilley was saluting from the door, and Shad was shouting, "Come
here! Grab this dirty crook!" He pointed at Fowler. "Take him
along outside."

They did, for all of Fowler's struggling. Aras Dilley jabbed
Fowler's right wrist with a bayonet. It spilled blood down on his
hand, so scrubbed for surgery, and like blood his red hair
tumbled over his forehead.

Shad marched out with them, pulling his automatic pistol from
its holster and looking at it happily.

Doremus was held, his mouth was clapped shut, by two guards as
he tried to reach Fowler. Emil Staubmeyer seemed a little scared,
but Effingham Swan, suave and amused, leaned his elbows on the
table and tapped his teeth with a pencil.

From the courtyard, the sound of a rifle volley, a terrifying
wail, one single emphatic shot, and nothing after.

20

The real trouble with the Jews is that they are cruel. Anybody
with a knowledge of history knows how they tortured poor debtors
in secret catacombs, all through the Middle Ages. Whereas the
Nordic is distinguished by his gentleness and his
kind-heartedness to friends, children, dogs, and people of
inferior races.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

The review in Dewey Haik's provincial court of Judge Swan's
sentence on Greenhill was influenced by County Commissioner
Ledue's testimony that after the execution he found in
Greenhill's house a cache of the most seditious documents: copies
of Trowbridge's Lance for Democracy, books by Marx and
Trotzky, Communistic pamphlets urging citizens to assassinate the
Chief.

Mary, Mrs. Greenhill, insisted that her husband had never read
such things; that, if anything, he had been too indifferent to
politics. Naturally, her word could not be taken against that of
Commissioner Ledue, Assistant Commissioner Staubmeyer (known
everywhere as a scholar and man of probity), and Military Judge
Effingham Swan. It was necessary to punish Mrs. Greenhill--or,
rather, to give a strong warning to other Mrs. Greenhills--by
seizing all the property and money Greenhill had left her.

Anyway, Mary did not fight very vigorously. Perhaps she
realized her guilt. In two days she turned from the crispest,
smartest, most swift-spoken woman in Fort Beulah into a silent
hag, dragging about in shabby and unkempt black. Her son and she
went to live with her father, Doremus Jessup.

Some said that Jessup should have fought for her and her
property. But he was not legally permitted to do so. He was on
parole, subject, at the will of the properly constituted
authorities, to a penitentiary sentence.

So Mary returned to the house and the overfurnished bedroom
she had left as a bride. She could not, she said, endure its
memories. She took the attic room that had never been quite
"finished off." She sat up there all day, all evening, and her
parents never heard a sound. But within a week her David was
playing about the yard most joyfully . . . playing that he was an
M.M. officer.

The whole house seemed dead, and all that were in it seemed
frightened, nervous, forever waiting for something unknown--all
save David and, perhaps, Mrs. Candy, bustling in her kitchen.

Meals had been notoriously cheerful at the Jessups'; Doremus
chattered to an audience of Mrs. Candy and Sissy, flustering Emma
with the most outrageous assertions--that he was planning to go
to Greenland; that President Windrip had taken to riding down
Pennsylvania Avenue on an elephant; and Mrs. Candy was as
unscrupulous as all good cooks in trying to render them
speechlessly drowsy after dinner and to encourage the stealthy
expansion of Doremus's already rotund little belly, with her
mince pie, her apple pie with enough shortening to make the eyes
pop out in sweet anguish, the fat corn fritters and candied
potatoes with the broiled chicken, the clam chowder made with
cream.

Now, there was little talk among the adults at table and,
though Mary was not showily "brave," but colorless as a glass of
water, they were nervously watching her. Everything they spoke of
seemed to point toward the murder and the Corpos; if you said,
"It's quite a warm fall," you felt that the table was thinking,
"So the M.M.'s can go on marching for a long time yet before snow
flies," and then you choked and asked sharply for the gravy.
Always Mary was there, a stone statue chilling the warm and
commonplace people packed in beside her.

So it came about that David dominated the table talk, for the
first delightful time in his nine years of experiment with life,
and David liked that very much indeed, and his grandfather liked
it not nearly so well.

He chattered, like an entire palm-ful of monkeys, about
Foolish, about his new playmates (children of Medary Cole, the
miller), about the apparent fact that crocodiles are rarely found
in the Beulah River, and the more moving fact that the Rotenstern
young had driven with their father clear to Albany.

Now Doremus was fond of children; approved of them; felt with
an earnestness uncommon to parents and grandparents that they
were human beings and as likely as the next one to become
editors. But he hadn't enough sap of the Christmas holly in his
veins to enjoy listening without cessation to the bright prattle
of children. Few males have, outside of Louisa May Alcott. He
thought (though he wasn't very dogmatic about it) that the talk
of a Washington correspondent about politics was likely to be
more interesting than Davy's remarks on cornflakes and garter
snakes, so he went on loving the boy and wishing he would shut
up. And escaped as soon as possible from Mary's gloom and Emma's
suffocating thoughtfulness, wherein you felt, every time Emma
begged, "Oh, you must take just a little more of
the nice chestnut dressing, Mary dearie," that you really ought
to burst into tears.

Doremus suspected that Emma was, essentially, more appalled by
his having gone to jail than by the murder of her son-in-law.
Jessups simply didn't go to jail. People who went to jail were
bad, just as barn-burners and men accused of that
fascinatingly obscure amusement, a "statutory offense," were bad;
and as for bad people, you might try to be forgiving and tender,
but you didn't sit down to meals with them. It was all so
irregular, and most upsetting to the household routine!

So Emma loved him and worried about him till he wanted to go
fishing and actually did go so far as to get out his flies.

But Lorinda had said to him, with eyes brilliant and
unworried, "And I thought you were just a cud-chewing Liberal
that didn't mind being milked! I am so proud of you! You've
encouraged me to fight against--Listen, the minute I heard about
your imprisonment I chased Nipper out of my kitchen with a bread
knife! . . . Well, anyway, I thought about doing it!"

The office was deader than his home. The worst of it was that
it wasn't so very bad--that, he saw, he could slip into serving
the Corpo state with, eventually, no more sense of shame than was
felt by old colleagues of his who in pre-Corpo days had written
advertisements for fraudulent mouth washes or tasteless
cigarettes, or written for supposedly reputable magazines
mechanical stories about young love. In a waking nightmare after
his imprisonment, Doremus had pictured Staubmeyer and Ledue in
the Informer office standing over him with whips,
demanding that he turn out sickening praise for the Corpos,
yelling at him until he rose and killed and was killed. Actually,
Shad stayed away from the office, and Doremus's master,
Staubmeyer, was ever so friendly and modest and rather
nauseatingly full of praise for his craftsmanship. Staubmeyer
seemed satisfied when, instead of the "apology" demanded by Swan,
Doremus stated that "Henceforth this paper will cease all
criticisms of the present government."

Doremus received from District Commissioner Reek a jolly
telegram thanking him for "gallantly deciding turn your great
talent service people and correcting errors doubtless made by us
in effort set up new more realistic state." Ur! said Doremus and
did not chuck the message at the clothes-basket waste-basket, but
carefully walked over and rammed it down amid the trash.

He was able, by remaining with the Informer in her
prostitute days, to keep Staubmeyer from discharging Dan Wilgus,
who was sniffy to the new boss and unnaturally respectful now to
Doremus. And he invented what he called the "Yow-yow editorial."
This was a dirty device of stating as strongly as he could an
indictment of Corpoism, then answering it as feebly as he could,
as with a whining "Yow-yow-yow--that's what you say!"
Neither Staubmeyer nor Shad caught him at it, but Doremus hoped
fearfully that the shrewd Effingham Swan would never see the
Yow-yows.

So week on week he got along not too badly--and there was not
one minute when he did not hate this filthy slavery, when he did
not have to force himself to stay there, when he did not snarl at
himself, "Then why do you stay?"

His answers to that challenge came glibly and conventionally
enough: "He was too old to start in life again. And he had a wife
and family to support"--Emma, Sissy, and now Mary and David.

All these years he had heard responsible men who weren't being
quite honest--radio announcers who soft-soaped speakers who were
fools and wares that were trash, and who canaryishly chirped
"Thank you, Major Blister" when they would rather have kicked
Major Blister, preachers who did not believe the decayed
doctrines they dealt out, doctors who did not dare tell lady
invalids that they were sex-hungry exhibitionists, merchants who
peddled brass for gold--heard all of them complacently excuse
themselves by explaining that they were too old to change and
that they had "a wife and family to support."

Why not let the wife and family die of starvation or get out
and hustle for themselves, if by no other means the world could
have the chance of being freed from the most boresome, most dull,
and foulest disease of having always to be a little
dishonest?

So he raged--and went on grinding out a paper dull and a
little dishonest--but not forever. Otherwise the history of
Doremus Jessup would be too drearily common to be worth
recording.

Again and again, figuring it out on rough sheets of copy paper
(adorned also with concentric circles, squares, whorls, and the
most improbable fish), he estimated that even without selling the
Informer or his house, as under Corpo espionage he
certainly could not if he fled to Canada, he could cash in about
$20,000. Say enough to give him an income of a thousand a
year--twenty dollars a week, provided he could smuggle the money
out of the country, which the Corpos were daily making more
difficult.

Well, Emma and Sissy and Mary and he could live on
that, in a four-room cottage, and perhaps Sissy and Mary could
find work.

But as for himself--

It was all very well to talk about men like Thomas Mann and
Lion Feuchtwanger and Romain Rolland, who in exile remained
writers whose every word was in demand, about Professors Einstein
or Salvemini, or, under Corpoism, about the recently exiled or
self-exiled Americans, Walt Trowbridge, Mike Gold, William Allen
White, John Dos Passos, H. L. Mencken, Rexford Tugwell, Oswald
Villard. Nowhere in the world, except possibly in Greenland or
Germany, would such stars be unable to find work and soothing
respect. But what was an ordinary newspaper hack, especially if
he was over forty-five, to do in a strange land--and more
especially if he had a wife named Emma (or Carolina or Nancy or
Griselda or anything else) who didn't at all fancy going and
living in a sod hut on behalf of honesty and freedom?

So debated Doremus, like some hundreds of thousands of other
craftsmen, teachers, lawyers, what-not, in some dozens of
countries under a dictatorship, who were aware enough to resent
the tyranny, conscientious enough not to take its bribes
cynically, yet not so abnormally courageous as to go willingly to
exile or dungeon or chopping-block--particularly when they "had
wives and families to support."

Doremus hinted once to Emil Staubmeyer that Emil was "getting
onto the ropes so well" that he thought of getting out, of
quitting newspaper work for good.

The hitherto friendly Mr. Staubmeyer said sharply, "What'd you
do? Sneak off to Canada and join the propagandists against the
Chief? Nothing doing! You'll stay right here and help me--help
us!" And that afternoon Commissioner Shad Ledue shouldered in and
grumbled, "Dr. Staubmeyer tells me you're doing pretty fairly
good work, Jessup, but I want to warn you to keep it up. Remember
that Judge Swan only let you out on parole . . . to me! You can
do fine if you just set your mind to it!"

"If you just set your mind to it!" The one time when the boy
Doremus had hated his father had been when he used that
condescending phrase.

He saw that, for all the apparent prosaic calm of day after
day on the paper, he was equally in danger of slipping into
acceptance of his serfdom and of whips and bars if he didn't
slip. And he continued to be just as sick each time he wrote:
"The crowd of fifty thousand people who greeted President Windrip
in the university stadium at Iowa City was an impressive sign of
the constantly growing interest of all Americans in political
affairs," and Staubmeyer changed it to: "The vast and
enthusiastic crowd of seventy thousand loyal admirers who wildly
applauded and listened to the stirring address of the Chief in
the handsome university stadium in beautiful Iowa City, Iowa, is
an impressive yet quite typical sign of the growing devotion of
all true Americans to political study under the inspiration of
the Corpo government."

Perhaps his worst irritations were that Staubmeyer had pushed
a desk and his sleek, sweaty person into Doremus's private
office, once sacred to his solitary grouches, and that Doc
Itchitt, hitherto his worshiping disciple, seemed always to be
secretly laughing at him.

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of
them turn "reasonable" and become your enemies, one quarter are
afraid to stop and speak and one quarter are killed and you die
with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.

When he was with Lorinda, gone was all the pleasant toying and
sympathetic talk with which they had relieved boredom. She was
fierce now, and vibrant. She drew him close enough to her, but
instantly she would be thinking of him only as a comrade in plots
to kill off the Corpos. (And it was pretty much a real
killing-off that she meant; there wasn't left to view any great
amount of her plausible pacifism.)

She was busy with good and perilous works. Partner Nipper had
not been able to keep her in the Tavern kitchen; she had so
systematized the work that she had many days and evenings free,
and she had started a cooking-class for farm girls and young farm
wives who, caught between the provincial and the industrial
generations, had learned neither good rural cooking with a wood
fire, nor yet how to deal with canned goods and electric
grills--and who most certainly had not learned how to combine so
as to compel the tight-fisted little locally owned
power-and-light companies to furnish electricity at tolerable
rates.

"Heavensake, keep this quiet, but I'm getting acquainted with
these country gals--getting ready for the day when we begin to
organize against the Corpos. I depend on them, not the well-to-do
women that used to want suffrage but that can't endure the
thought of revolution," Lorinda whispered to him. "We've got to
do something."

"All right, Lorinda B. Anthony," he sighed.

And Karl Pascal stuck.

At Pollikop's garage, when he first saw Doremus after the
jailing, he said, "God, I was sorry to hear about their pinching
you, Mr. Jessup! But say, aren't you ready to join us Communists
now?" (He looked about anxiously as he said it.)

"I thought there weren't any more Bolos."

"Oh, we're supposed to be wiped out. But I guess you'll notice
a few mysterious strikes starting now and then, even though there
can't be any more strikes! Why aren't you joining us?
There's where you belong, c-comrade!"

"Look here, Karl: you've always said the difference between
the Socialists and the Communists was that you believed in
complete ownership of all means of production, not just
utilities; and that you admitted the violent class war and the
Socialists didn't. That's poppycock! The real difference is that
you Communists serve Russia. It's your Holy Land. Well--Russia
has all my prayers, right after the prayers for my family and for
the Chief, but what I'm interested in civilizing and protecting
against its enemies isn't Russia but America. Is that so banal to
say? Well, it wouldn't be banal for a Russian comrade to observe
that he was for Russia! And America needs our propaganda more
every day. Another thing: I'm a middle-class intellectual. I'd
never call myself any such a damn silly thing, but since you Reds
coined it, I'll have to accept it. That's my class, and that's
what I'm interested in. The proletarians are probably noble
fellows, but I certainly do not think that the interests of the
middle-class intellectuals and the proletarians are the same.
They want bread. We want--well, all right, say it, we want cake!
And when you get a proletarian ambitious enough to want cake,
too--why, in America, he becomes a middle-class intellectual just
as fast as he can--if he can!"

"Look here, when you think of 3 per cent of the people owning
90 per cent of the wealth--"

"I don't think of it! It does not follow that because a
good many of the intellectuals belong to the 97 per cent of the
broke--that plenty of actors and teachers and nurses and
musicians don't get any better paid than stage hands or
electricians, therefore their interests are the same. It isn't
what you earn but how you spend it that fixes your class--whether
you prefer bigger funeral services or more books. I'm tired of
apologizing for not having a dirty neck!"

"Honestly, Mr. Jessup, that's damn nonsense, and you know
it!"

"Is it? Well, it's my American covered-wagon damn nonsense,
and not the propaganda-aeroplane damn nonsense of Marx and
Moscow!"

"Oh, you'll join us yet."

"Listen, Comrade Karl, Windrip and Hitler will join Stalin
long before the descendants of Dan'l Webster. You see, we don't
like murder as a way of argument--that's what really marks the
Liberal!"

About his future Father Perefixe was brief: "I'm going
back to Canada where I belong--away to the freedom of the King.
Hate to give up, Doremus, but I'm no Thomas à Becket, but
just a plain, scared, fat little clark!"

The surprise among old acquaintances was Medary Cole, the
miller.

A little younger than Francis Tasbrough and R. C. Crowley,
less intensely aristocratic than those noblemen, since only one
generation separated him from a chin-whiskered Yankee farmer and
not two, as with them, he had been their satellite at the Country
Club and, as to solid virtue, been president of the Rotary Club.
He had always considered Doremus a man who, without such excuse
as being a Jew or a Hunky or poor, was yet flippant about the
sanctities of Main Street and Wall Street. They were neighbors,
as Cole's "Cape Cod cottage" was just below Pleasant Hill, but
they had not by habit been droppers-in.

Now, when Cole came bringing David home, or calling for his
daughter Angela, David's new mate, toward supper time of a chilly
fall evening, he stopped gratefully for a hot rum punch, and
asked Doremus whether he really thought inflation was "such a
good thing."

He burst out, one evening, "Jessup, there isn't another person
in this town I'd dare say this to, not even my wife, but I'm
getting awful sick of having these Minnie Mouses dictate where I
have to buy my gunnysacks and what I can pay my men. I won't
pretend I ever cared much for labor unions. But in those days, at
least the union members did get some of the swag. Now it goes to
support the M.M.'s. We pay them and pay them big to bully us. It
don't look so reasonable as it did in 1936. But, golly, don't
tell anybody I said that!"

And Cole went off shaking his head, bewildered--he who had
ecstatically voted for Mr. Windrip.

On a day in late October, suddenly striking in every city and
village and back-hill hide-out, the Corpos ended all crime in
America forever, so titanic a feat that it was mentioned in the
London Times. Seventy thousand selected Minute Men,
working in combination with town and state police officers, all
under the chiefs of the government secret service, arrested every
known or faintly suspected criminal in the country. They were
tried under court-martial procedure; one in ten was shot
immediately, four in ten were given prison sentences, three in
ten released as innocent . . . and two in ten taken into the
M.M.'s as inspectors.

There were protests that at least six in ten had been
innocent, but this was adequately answered by Windrip's
courageous statement: "The way to stop crime is to stop it!"

The next day, Medary Cole crowed at Doremus, "Sometimes I've
felt like criticizing certain features of Corpo policy, but did
you see what the Chief did to the gangsters and racketeers?
Wonderful! I've told you right along what this country's needed
is a firm hand like Windrip's. No shilly-shallying about that
fellow! He saw that the way to stop crime was to just go out and
stop it!"

Then was revealed the New American Education, which, as
Sarason so justly said, was to be ever so much newer than the New
Educations of Germany, Italy, Poland, or even Turkey.

The authorities abruptly closed some scores of the smaller,
more independent colleges such as Williams, Bowdoin, Oberlin,
Georgetown, Antioch, Carleton, Lewis Institute, Commonwealth,
Princeton, Swarthmore, Kenyon, all vastly different one from
another but alike in not yet having entirely become machines. Few
of the state universities were closed; they were merely to be
absorbed by central Corpo universities, one in each of the eight
provinces. But the government began with only two. In the
Metropolitan District, Windrip University took over the
Rockefeller Center and Empire State buildings, with most of
Central Park for playground (excluding the general public from it
entirely, for the rest was an M.M. drill ground). The second was
Macgoblin University, in Chicago and vicinity, using the
buildings of Chicago and Northwestern universities, and Jackson
Park. President Hutchins of Chicago was rather unpleasant about
the whole thing and declined to stay on as an assistant
professor, so the authorities had politely to exile him.

Tattle-mongers suggested that the naming of the Chicago plant
after Macgoblin instead of Sarason suggested a beginning coolness
between Sarason and Windrip, but the two leaders were able to
quash such canards by appearing together at the great reception
given to Bishop Cannon by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union
and being photographed shaking hands.

Each of the two pioneer universities started with an
enrollment of fifty thousand, making ridiculous the pre-Corpo
schools, none of which, in 1935, had had more than thirty
thousand students. The enrollment was probably helped by the fact
that anyone could enter upon presenting a certificate showing
that he had completed two years in a high school or business
college, and a recommendation from a Corpo commissioner.

Dr. Macgoblin pointed out that this founding of entirely new
universities showed the enormous cultural superiority of the
Corpo state to the Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Fascists. Where these
amateurs in re-civilization had merely kicked out all treacherous
so-called "intellectual" teachers who mulishly declined to teach
physics, cookery, and geography according to the principles and
facts laid down by the political bureaus, and the Nazis had
merely added the sound measure of discharging Jews who dared
attempt to teach medicine, the Americans were the first to start
new and completely orthodox institutions, free from the very
first of any taint of "intellectualism."

All Corpo universities were to have the same curriculum,
entirely practical and modern, free of all snobbish
tradition.

Entirely omitted were Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Biblical
study, archaeology, philology; all history before 1500--except
for one course which showed that, through the centuries, the key
to civilization had been the defense of Anglo-Saxon purity
against barbarians. Philosophy and its history, psychology,
economics, anthropology were retained, but, to avoid the
superstitious errors in ordinary textbooks, they were to be
conned only in new books prepared by able young scholars under
the direction of Dr. Macgoblin.

Students were encouraged to read, speak, and try to write
modern languages, but they were not to waste their time on the
so-called "literature"; reprints from recent newspapers were used
instead of antiquated fiction and sentimental poetry. As regards
English, some study of literature was permitted, to supply
quotations for political speeches, but the chief courses were in
advertising, party journalism, and business correspondence, and
no authors before 1800 might be mentioned, except Shakespeare and
Milton.

In the realm of so-called "pure science," it was realized that
only too much and too confusing research had already been done,
but no pre-Corpo university had ever shown such a wealth of
courses in mining engineering, lakeshore-cottage architecture,
modern foremanship and production methods, exhibition gymnastics,
the higher accountancy, therapeutics of athlete's foot, canning
and fruit dehydration, kindergarten training, organization of
chess, checkers, and bridge tournaments, cultivation of will
power, band music for mass meetings, schnauzer-breeding,
stainless-steel formulæ, cement-road construction, and all
other really useful subjects for the formation of the new-world
mind and character. And no scholastic institution, even West
Point, had ever so richly recognized sport as not a subsidiary
but a primary department of scholarship. All the more familiar
games were earnestly taught, and to them were added the most
absorbing speed contests in infantry drill, aviation, bombing,
and operation of tanks, armored cars, and machine guns. All of
these carried academic credits, though students were urged not to
elect sports for more than one third of their credits.

What really showed the difference from old-fogy inefficiency
was that with the educational speed-up of the Corpo universities,
any bright lad could graduate in two years.

As he read the prospectuses for these Olympian, these
Ringling-Barnum and Bailey universities, Doremus remembered that
Victor Loveland, who a year ago had taught Greek in a little
college called Isaiah, was now grinding out reading and
arithmetic in a Corpo labor camp in Maine. Oh well, Isaiah itself
had been closed, and its former president, Dr. Owen J. Peaseley,
District Director of Education, was to be right-hand man to
Professor Almeric Trout when they founded the University of the
Northeastern Province, which was to supplant Harvard, Radcliffe,
Boston University, and Brown. He was already working on the
university yell, and for that "project" had sent out letters to
167 of the more prominent poets in America, asking for
suggestions.

21

It was not only the November sleet, setting up a forbidding
curtain before the mountains, turning the roadways into
slipperiness on which a car would swing around and crash into
poles, that kept Doremus stubbornly at home that morning, sitting
on his shoulder blades before the fireplace. It was the feeling
that there was no point in going to the office; no chance even of
a picturesque fight. But he was not contented before the fire. He
could find no authentic news even in the papers from Boston or
New York, in both of which the morning papers had been combined
by the government into one sheet, rich in comic strips, in
syndicated gossip from Hollywood, and, indeed, lacking only any
news.

He cursed, threw down the New York Daily Corporate, and
tried to read a new novel about a lady whose husband was
indelicate in bed and who was too absorbed by the novels he wrote
about lady novelists whose husbands were too absorbed by the
novels they wrote about lady novelists to appreciate the fine
sensibilities of lady novelists who wrote about gentleman
novelists--Anyway, he chucked the book after the newspaper. The
lady's woes didn't seem very important now, in a burning
world.

He could hear Emma in the kitchen discussing with Mrs. Candy
the best way of making a chicken pie. They talked without relief;
really, they were not so much talking as thinking aloud. Doremus
admitted that the nice making of a chicken pie was a thing of
consequence, but the blur of voices irritated him. Then Sissy
slammed into the room, and Sissy should an hour ago have been at
high school, where she was a senior--to graduate next year and
possibly go to some new and horrible provincial university.

"What ho! What are you doing home? Why aren't you in
school?"

"Oh. That." She squatted on the padded fender seat,
chin in hands, looking up at him, not seeing him. "I don't know
's I'll ever go there any more. You have to repeat a new oath
every morning: 'I pledge myself to serve the Corporate State, the
Chief, all Commissioners, the Mystic Wheel, and the troops of the
Republic in every thought and deed.' Now I ask you! Is
that tripe!"

"How you going to get into the university?"

"Huh! Smile at Prof Staubmeyer--if it doesn't gag me!"

"Oh, well--Well--" He could not think of anything meatier to
say.

The doorbell, a shuffling in the hall as of snowy feet, and
Julian Falck came sheepishly in.

"Oh. That." He squatted beside her. He absently held
her hand, and she did not seem to notice it, either. "Amherst's
got hers. Corpos closing it today. I got tipped off last Saturday
and beat it. (They have a cute way of rounding up the students
when they close a college and arresting a few of 'em, just to
cheer up the profs.)" To Doremus: "Well, sir, I think you'll have
to find a place for me on the Informer, wiping presses.
Could you?"

"Afraid not, boy. Give anything if I could. But I'm a prisoner
there. God! Just having to say that makes me appreciate what a
rotten position I have!"

"Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I understand, of course. Well, I don't
just know what I am going to do. Remember back in '33 and '34 and
'35 how many good eggs there were--and some of them medics and
law graduates and trained engineers and so on--that simply
couldn't get a job? Well, it's worse now. I looked over Amherst,
and had a try at Springfield, and I've been here in town two
days--I'd hoped to have something before I saw you, Sis--why, I
even asked Mrs. Pike if she didn't need somebody to wash dishes
at the Tavern, but so far there isn't a thing. 'Young gentleman,
two years in college, ninety-nine-point-three pure and thorough
knowledge Thirty-nine Articles, able drive car, teach tennis and
contract, amiable disposition, desires position--digging
ditches.'"

"You will get something! I'll see you do, my poppet!"
insisted Sissy. She was less modernistic and cold with Julian now
than Doremus had thought her.

"Thanks, Sis, but honest to God--I hope I'm not whining, but
looks like I'd either have to enlist in the lousy M.M.'s, or go
to a labor camp. I can't stay home and sponge on Granddad. The
poor old Reverend hasn't got enough to keep a pussycat in face
powder."

"Lookit! Lookit!" Sissy clinched with Julian and bussed him,
unabashed. "I've got an idea--a new stunt. You know, one of these
'New Careers for Youth' things. Listen! Last summer there was a
friend of Lindy Pike's staying with her and she was an interior
decorator from Buffalo, and she said they have a hell of a--"

("Siss-sy!")

"--time getting real, genuine, old hand-hewn beams that
everybody wants so much now in these phony-Old-English suburban
living rooms. Well, look! Round here there's ten million old
barns with hand-adzed beams just falling down--farmers probably
be glad to have you haul 'em off. I kind of thought about it for
myself--being an architect, you know--and John Pollikop said he'd
sell me a swell, dirty-looking old five-ton truck for four
hundred bucks--in pre-inflation real money, I mean--and on
time. Let's you and me try a load of assorted fancy beams."

"Swell!" said Julian.

"Well--" said Doremus.

"Come on!" Sissy leaped up. "Let's go ask Lindy what she
thinks. She's the only one in this family that's got any business
sense."

"I don't seem to hanker much after going out there in this
weather--nasty roads," Doremus puffed.

"Nonsense, Doremus! With Julian driving? He's a poor speller
and his back-hand is fierce, but as a driver, he's better than I
am! Why, it's a pleasure to skid with him! Come on! Hey, Mother!
We'll be back in nour or two."

If Emma ever got beyond her distant, "Why, I thought you were
in school, already," none of the three musketeers heard it. They
were bundling up and crawling out into the sleet.

Lorinda Pike was in the Tavern kitchen, in a calico print with
rolled sleeves, dipping doughnuts into deep fat--a picture right
out of the romantic days (which Buzz Windrip was trying to
restore) when a female who had brought up eleven children and
been midwife to dozens of cows was regarded as too fragile to
vote. She was ruddy-faced from the stove, but she cocked a lively
eye at them, and her greeting was "Have a doughnut? Good!" She
led them from the kitchen with its attendant and eavesdropping
horde of a Canuck kitchenmaid and two cats, and they sat in the
beautiful butler's-pantry, with its shelved rows of Italian
majolica plates and cups and saucers--entirely unsuitable to
Vermont, attesting a certain artiness in Lorinda, yet by their
cleanness and order revealing her as a sound worker. Sissy
sketched her plan--behind the statistics there was an agreeable
picture of herself and Julian, gipsies in khaki, on the seat of a
gipsy truck, peddling silvery old pine rafters.

"Nope. Not a chance," said Lorinda regretfully. "The expensive
suburban-villa business--oh, it isn't gone: there's a surprising
number of middlemen and professional men who are doing quite well
out of having their wealth taken away and distributed to the
masses. But all the building is in the hands of contractors who
are in politics--good old Windrip is so consistently American
that he's kept up all our traditional graft, even if he has
thrown out all our traditional independence. They wouldn't leave
you one cent profit."

"She's probably right," said Doremus.

"Be the first time I ever was, then!" sniffed Lorinda. "Why, I
was so simple that I thought women voters knew men too well to
fall for noble words on the radio!"

They sat in the sedan, outside the Tavern; Julian and Sissy in
front, Doremus in the back seat, dignified and miserable in mummy
swathings.

"That's that," said Sissy. "Swell period for young dreamers
the Dictator's brought in. You can march to military bands--or
you can sit home--or you can go to prison. Primavera di
Bellezza!"

"Yes. . . . Well, I'll find something to do. . . . Sissy, are
you going to marry me--soon as I get a job?"

"Before, if you want to. Though marriage seems to me absolute
rot now, Julian. They can't go and let us see that every doggone
one of our old institutions is a rotten fake, the way Church and
State and everything has laid down to the Corpos, and still
expect us to think they're so hot! But for unformed minds like
your grandfather and Doremus, I suppose we'll have to pretend to
believe that the preachers who stand for Big Chief Windrip are
still so sanctified that they can sell God's license to
love!"

("Sis-sy!")

"(Oh. I forgot you were there, Dad!) But anyway, we're not
going to have any kids. Oh, I like children! I'd like to have a
dozen of the little devils around. But if people have gone so
soft and turned the world over to stuffed shirts and dictators,
they needn't expect any decent woman to bring children into such
an insane asylum! Why, the more you really do love
children, the more you'll want 'em not to be born, now!"

Julian boasted, in a manner quite as lover-like and naïve
as that of any suitor a hundred years ago, "Yes. But just the
same, we'll be having children."

"Hell! I suppose so!" said the golden girl.

It was the unconsidered Doremus who found a job for
Julian.

Old Dr. Marcus Olmsted was trying to steel himself to carry on
the work of his sometime partner, Fowler Greenhill. He was not
strong enough for much winter driving, and so hotly now did he
hate the murderers of his friend that he would not take on any
youngster who was in the M.M.'s or who had half acknowledged
their authority by going to a labor camp. So Julian was chosen to
drive him, night and day, and presently to help him by giving
anesthetic, bandaging hurt legs; and the Julian who had within
one week "decided that he wanted to be" an aviator, a music
critic, an air-conditioning engineer, an archæologist
excavating in Yucatan, was dead-set on medicine and replaced for
Doremus his dead doctor son-in-law. And Doremus heard Julian and
Sissy boasting and squabbling and squeaking in the half-lighted
parlor and from them--from them and from David and Lorinda and
Buck Titus--got resolution enough to go on in the Informer
office without choking Staubmeyer to death.

22

December tenth was the birthday of Berzelius Windrip, though
in his earlier days as a politician, before he fruitfully
realized that lies sometimes get printed and unjustly remembered
against you, he had been wont to tell the world that his birthday
was on December twenty-fifth, like one whom he admitted to be an
even greater leader, and to shout, with real tears in his eyes,
that his complete name was Berzelius Noel Weinacht Windrip.

His birthday in 1937 he commemorated by the historical "Order
of Regulation," which stated that though the Corporate government
had proved both its stability and its good-will, there were still
certain stupid or vicious "elements" who, in their foul envy of
Corpo success, wanted to destroy everything that was good. The
kind-hearted government was fed-up, and the country was informed
that, from this day on, any person who by word or act sought to
harm or discredit the State, would be executed or interned.
Inasmuch as the prisons were already too full, both for these
slanderous criminals and for the persons whom the kind-hearted
State had to guard by "protective arrest," there were immediately
to be opened, all over the country, concentration camps.

Doremus guessed that the reason for the concentration camps
was not only the provision of extra room for victims but, even
more, the provision of places where the livelier young M.M.'s
could amuse themselves without interference from old-time
professional policemen and prison-keepers, most of whom regarded
their charges not as enemies, to be tortured, but just as cattle,
to be kept safely.

On the eleventh, a concentration camp was enthusiastically
opened, with band music, paper flowers, and speeches by District
Commissioner Reek and Shad Ledue, at Trianon, nine miles north of
Fort Beulah, in what had been a modern experimental school for
girls. (The girls and their teachers, no sound material for
Corpoism anyway, were simply sent about their business.)

And on that day and every day afterward, Doremus got from
journalist friends all over the country secret news of Corpo
terrorism and of the first bloody rebellions against the
Corpos.

In Arkansas, a group of ninety-six former sharecroppers, who
had always bellyached about their misfortunes yet seemed not a
bit happier in well-run, hygienic labor camps with free weekly
band concerts, attacked the superintendent's office at one camp
and killed the superintendent and five assistants. They were
rounded up by an M.M. regiment from Little Rock, stood up in a
winter-ragged cornfield, told to run, and shot in the back with
machine guns as they comically staggered away.

In San Francisco, dock-workers tried to start an absolutely
illegal strike, and their leaders, known to be Communists, were
so treasonable in their speeches against the government that an
M.M. commander had three of them tied up to a bale of rattan,
which was soaked with oil and set afire. The Commander gave
warning to all such malcontents by shooting off the criminals'
fingers and ears while they were burning, and so skilled a
marksman was he, so much credit to the efficient M.M. training,
that he did not kill one single man while thus trimming them up.
He afterward went in search of Tom Mooney (released by the
Supreme Court of the United States, early in 1936), but that
notorious anti-Corpo agitator had had the fear of God put into
him properly, and had escaped on a schooner for Tahiti.

In Pawtucket, a man who ought to have been free from the
rotten seditious notions of such so-called labor-leaders, in fact
a man who was a fashionable dentist and director in a bank,
absurdly resented the attentions which half-a-dozen uniformed
M.M.'s--they were all on leave, and merely full of youthful
spirits, anyway--bestowed upon his wife at a café and, in
the confusion, shot and killed three of them. Ordinarily, since
it was none of the public's business anyway, the M.M.'s did not
give out details of their disciplining of rebels, but in this
case, where the fool of a dentist had shown himself to be a
homicidal maniac, the local M.M. commander permitted the papers
to print the fact that the dentist had been given sixty-nine
lashes with a flexible steel rod, then, when he came to, left to
think over his murderous idiocy in a cell in which there was two
feet of water in the bottom--but, rather ironically, none to
drink. Unfortunately, the fellow died before having the
opportunity to seek religious consolation.

In Scranton, the Catholic pastor of a working-class church was
kidnaped and beaten.

In central Kansas, a man named George W. Smith pointlessly
gathered a couple of hundred farmers armed with shotguns and
sporting rifles and an absurdly few automatic-pistols, and led
them in burning an M.M. barracks. M.M. tanks were called out, and
the hick would-be rebels were not, this time, used as warnings,
but were overcome with mustard gas, then disposed of with hand
grenades, which was an altogether intelligent move, since there
was nothing of the scoundrels left for sentimental relatives to
bury and make propaganda over.

But in New York City the case was the opposite--instead of
being thus surprised, the M.M.'s rounded up all suspected
Communists in the former boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, and
all persons who were reported to have been seen consorting with
such Communists, and interned the lot of them in the nineteen
concentration camps on Long Island. . . . Most of them wailed
that they were not Communists at all.

For the first time in America, except during the Civil War and
the World War, people were afraid to say whatever came to their
tongues. On the streets, on trains, at theaters, men looked about
to see who might be listening before they dared so much as say
there was a drought in the West, for someone might suppose they
were blaming the drought on the Chief! They were particularly
skittish about waiters, who were supposed to listen from the
ambush which every waiter carries about with him anyway, and to
report to the M.M.'s. People who could not resist talking
politics spoke of Windrip as "Colonel Robinson" or "Dr. Brown"
and of Sarason as "Judge Jones" or "my cousin Kaspar," and you
would hear gossips hissing "Shhh!" at the seemingly innocent
statement, "My cousin doesn't seem to be as keen on playing
bridge with the Doctor as he used to--I'll bet sometime they'll
quit playing."

Every moment everyone felt fear, nameless and omnipresent.
They were as jumpy as men in a plague district. Any sudden sound,
any unexplained footstep, any unfamiliar script on an envelope,
made them startle; and for months they never felt secure enough
to let themselves go, in complete sleep. And with the coming of
fear went out their pride.

Daily--common now as weather reports--were the rumors of
people who had suddenly been carried off "under protective
arrest," and daily more of them were celebrities. At first the
M.M.'s had, outside of the one stroke against Congress, dared to
arrest only the unknown and defenseless. Now, incredulously--for
these leaders had seemed invulnerable, above the ordinary
law--you heard of judges, army officers, ex-state governors,
bankers who had not played in with the Corpos, Jewish lawyers who
had been ambassadors, being carted off to the common stink and
mud of the cells.

To the journalist Doremus and his family it was not least
interesting that among these imprisoned celebrities were so many
journalists: Raymond Moley, Frank Simonds, Frank Kent, Heywood
Broun, Mark Sullivan, Earl Browder, Franklin P. Adams, George
Seldes, Frazier Hunt, Garet Garrett, Granville Hicks, Edwin
James, Robert Morss Lovett--men who differed grotesquely except
in their common dislike of being little disciples of Sarason and
Macgoblin.

Few writers for Hearst were arrested, however.

The plague came nearer to Doremus when unrenowned editors in
Lowell and Providence and Albany, who had done nothing more than
fail to be enthusiastic about the Corpos, were taken away for
"questioning," and not released for weeks--months.

It came much nearer at the time of the book-burning.

All over the country, books that might threaten the Pax Romana
of the Corporate State were gleefully being burned by the more
scholarly Minute Men. This form of safeguarding the State--so
modern that it had scarce been known prior to A.D. 1300--was
instituted by Secretary of Culture Macgoblin, but in each
province the crusaders were allowed to have the fun of picking
out their own paper-and-ink traitors. In the Northeastern
Province, Judge Effingham Swan and Dr. Owen J. Peaseley were
appointed censors by Commissioner Dewey Haik, and their index was
lyrically praised all through the country.

For Swan saw that it was not such obvious anarchists and
soreheads as Darrow, Steffens, Norman Thomas, who were the real
danger; like rattlesnakes, their noisiness betrayed their venom.
The real enemies were men whose sanctification by death had
appallingly permitted them to sneak even into respectable school
libraries--men so perverse that they had been traitors to the
Corpo State years and years before there had been any Corpo
State; and Swan (with Peaseley chirping agreement) barred from
all sale or possession the books of Thoreau, Emerson, Whittier,
Whitman, Mark Twain, Howells, and The New Freedom, by
Woodrow Wilson, for though in later life Wilson became a sound
manipulative politician, he had earlier been troubled with
itching ideals.

It goes without saying that Swan denounced all such atheistic
foreigners, dead or alive, as Wells, Marx, Shaw, the Mann
brothers, Tolstoy, and P. G. Wodehouse with his unscrupulous
propaganda against the aristocratic tradition. (Who could tell?
Perhaps, some day, in a corporate empire, he might be Sir
Effingham Swan, Bart.)

And in one item Swan showed blinding genius--he had the
foresight to see the peril of that cynical volume, The
Collected Sayings of Will Rogers.

Of the book-burnings in Syracuse and Schenectady and Hartford,
Doremus had heard, but they seemed improbable as ghost
stories.

The Jessup family were at dinner, just after seven, when on
the porch they heard the tramping they had half expected,
altogether dreaded. Mrs. Candy--even the icicle, Mrs. Candy, held
her breast in agitation before she stalked out to open the door.
Even David sat at table, spoon suspended in air.

Shad's voice, "In the name of the Chief!" Harsh feet in the
hall, and Shad waddling into the dining room, cap on, hand on
pistol, but grinning, and with leering geniality bawling, "H' are
yuh, folks! Search for bad books. Orders of the District
Commissioner. Come on, Jessup!" He looked at the fireplace to
which he had once brought so many armfuls of wood, and
snickered.

"If you'll just sit down in the other room--"

"I will like hell 'just sit down in the other room'! We're
burning the books tonight! Snap to it, Jessup!" Shad looked at
the exasperated Emma; he looked at Sissy; he winked with heavy
deliberation and chuckled, "H' are you, Mis' Jessup. Hello, Sis.
How's the kid?"

But at Mary Greenhill he did not look, nor she at him.

In the hall, Doremus found Shad's entourage, four sheepish
M.M.'s and a more sheepish Emil Staubmeyer, who whimpered, "Just
orders--you know--just orders."

Doremus safely said nothing; led them up to his study.

Now a week before he had removed every publication that any
sane Corpo could consider radical: his Das Kapital and
Veblen and all the Russian novels and even Sumner's
Folkways and Freud's Civilization and Its
Discontents; Thoreau and the other hoary scoundrels banned by
Swan; old files of the Nation and New Republic and
such copies as he had been able to get of Walt Trowbridge's
Lance for Democracy; had removed them and hidden them
inside an old horsehair sofa in the upper hall.

"I told you there was nothing," said Staubmeyer, after the
search. "Let's go."

Said Shad, "Huh! I know this house, Ensign. I used to work
here--had the privilege of putting up those storm windows you can
see there, and of getting bawled out right here in this room. You
won't remember those times, Doc--when I used to mow your lawn,
too, and you used to be so snotty!" Staubmeyer blushed. "You bet.
I know my way around, and there's a lot of fool books downstairs
in the sittin' room."

Indeed in that apartment variously called the drawing room,
the living room, the sittin' room, the Parlor and once, even, by
a spinster who thought editors were romantic, the studio, there
were two or three hundred volumes, mostly in "standard sets."
Shad glumly stared at them, the while he rubbed the faded
Brussels carpet with his spurs. He was worried. He had to
find something seditious!

He pointed at Doremus's dearest treasure, the
thirty-four-volume extra-illustrated edition of Dickens which had
been his father's, and his father's only insane extravagance.
Shad demanded of Staubmeyer, "That guy Dickens--didn't he do a
lot of complaining about conditions--about schools and the police
and everything?"

Staubmeyer protested, "Yes, but Shad--but, Captain Ledue, that
was a hundred years ago--"

"Makes no difference. Dead skunk stinks worse 'n a live
one."

Doremus cried, "Yes, but not for a hundred years!
Besides--"

The M.M.'s, obeying Shad's gesture, were already yanking the
volumes of Dickens from the shelves, dropping them on the floor,
covers cracking. Doremus seized an M.M.'s arm; from the door
Sissy shrieked. Shad lumbered up to him, enormous red fist at
Doremus's nose, growling, "Want to get the daylights beaten out
of you now . . . instead of later?"

Doremus and Sissy, side by side on a couch, watched the books
thrown in a heap. He grasped her hand, muttering to her,
"Hush--hush!" Oh, Sissy was a pretty girl, and young, but a
pretty girl schoolteacher had been attacked, her clothes stripped
off, and been left in the snow just south of town, two nights
ago.

Doremus could not have stayed away from the book-burning. It
was like seeing for the last time the face of a dead friend.

Kindling, excelsior, and spruce logs had been heaped on the
thin snow on the Green. (Tomorrow there would be a fine patch
burned in the hundred-year-old sward.) Round the pyre danced
M.M.'s schoolboys, students from the rather ratty business
college on Elm Street, and unknown farm lads, seizing books from
the pile guarded by the broadly cheerful Shad and skimming them
into the flames. Doremus saw his Martin Chuzzlewit fly
into air and land on the burning lid of an ancient commode. It
lay there open to a Phiz drawing of Sairey Gamp, which withered
instantly. As a small boy he had always laughed over that
drawing.

Who owned them, Doremus did not know, nor why they had been
seized, but he saw Alice in Wonderland and Omar
Khayyám and Shelley and The Man Who Was
Thursday and A Farewell to Arms all burning together,
to the greater glory of the Dictator and the greater
enlightenment of his people.

The fire was almost over when Karl Pascal pushed up to Shad
Ledue and shouted, "I hear you stinkers--I've been out driving a
guy, and I hear you raided my room and took off my books while I
was away!"

"You bet we did, Comrade!"

"And you're burning them--burning my--"

"Oh no, Comrade! Not burning 'em. Worth too blame much,
Comrade." Shad laughed very much. "They're at the police station.
We've just been waiting for you. It was awful nice to find all
your little Communist books. Here! Take him along!"

So Karl Pascal was the first prisoner to go from Fort Beulah
to the Trianon Concentration Camp--no; that's wrong; the second.
The first, so inconspicuous that one almost forgets him, was an
ordinary fellow, an electrician who had never so much as spoken
of politics. Brayden, his name was. A Minute Man who stood well
with Shad and Staubmeyer wanted Brayden's job. Brayden went to
concentration camp. Brayden was flogged when he declared, under
Shad's questioning, that he knew nothing about any plots against
the Chief. Brayden died, alone in a dark cell, before
January.

An English globe-trotter who gave up two weeks of December to
a thorough study of "conditions" in America, wrote to his London
paper, and later said on the wireless for the B.B.C.: "After a
thorough glance at America I find that, far from there being any
discontent with the Corpo administration among the people, they
have never been so happy and so resolutely set on making a Brave
New World. I asked a very prominent Hebrew banker about the
assertions that his people were being oppressed, and he assured
me, 'When we hear about such silly rumors, we are highly
amused.'"

23

Doremus was nervous. The Minute Men had come, not with Shad
but with Emil and a strange battalion-leader from Hanover, to
examine the private letters in his study. They were polite
enough, but alarmingly thorough. Then he knew, from the disorder
in his desk at the Informer, that someone had gone over
his papers there. Emil avoided him at the office. Doremus was
called to Shad's office and gruffly questioned about
correspondence which some denouncer had reported his having with
the agents of Walt Trowbridge.

So Doremus was nervous. So Doremus was certain that his time
for going to concentration camp was coming. He glanced back at
every stranger who seemed to be following him on the street. The
fruitman, Tony Mogliani, flowery advocate of Windrip, of
Mussolini, and of tobacco quid as a cure for cuts and burns,
asked him too many questions about his plans for the time when he
should "get through on the paper"; and once a tramp tried to quiz
Mrs. Candy, meantime peering at the pantry shelves, perhaps to
see if there was any sign of their being understocked, as if for
closing the house and fleeing. . . . But perhaps the tramp really
was a tramp.

In the office, in mid-afternoon, Doremus had a telephone call
from that scholar-farmer, Buck Titus:

"Going to be home this evening, about nine? Good! Got to see
you. Important! Say, see if you can have all your family and
Linda Pike and young Falck there, too, will you? Got an idea.
Important!"

As important ideas, just now, usually concerned being
imprisoned, Doremus and his women waited jumpily. Lorinda came in
twittering, for the sight of Emma always did make her twitter a
little, and in Lorinda there was no relief. Julian came in shyly,
and there was no relief in Julian. Mrs. Candy brought in
unsolicited tea with a dash of rum, and in her was some relief,
but it was all a dullness of fidgety waiting till Buck slammed
in, ten minutes late and very snowy.

"Sorkeepwaiting but I've been telephoning. Here's some news
you won't have even in the office yet, Dormouse. The forest
fire's getting nearer. This afternoon they arrested the editor of
the Rutland Herald--no charge laid against him yet--no
publicity--I got it from a commission merchant I deal with in
Rutland. You're next, Doremus. I reckon they've just been laying
off you till Staubmeyer picked your brains. Or maybe Ledue has
some nice idea about torturing you by keeping you waiting.
Anyway, you've got to get out. And tomorrow! To Canada! To stay!
By automobile. No can do by plane any more--Canadian government's
stopped that. You and Emma and Mary and Dave and Sis and the
whole damn shooting-match--and maybe Foolish and Mrs. Candy and
the canary!"

"Couldn't possibly! Take me weeks to realize on what
investments I've got. Guess I could raise twenty thousand, but
it'd take weeks."

"Sign 'em over to me, if you trust me--and you better! I can
cash in everything better than you can--stand in with the Corpos
better--been selling 'em horses and they think I'm the kind of
loud-mouthed walking gent that will join 'em! I've got fifteen
hundred Canadian dollars for you right here in my pocket, for a
starter."

"We'd never get across the border. The M.M.'s are watching
every inch, just looking for suspects like me."

"I've got a Canadian driver's license, and Canadian
registration plates ready to put on my car--we'll take mine--less
suspicious. I can look like a real farmer--that's because I am
one, I guess--I'm going to drive you all, by the way. I got the
plates smuggled in underneath the bottles in a case of ale! So
we're all set, and we'll start tomorrow night, if the weather
isn't too clear--hope there'll be snow."

"But Buck! Good Lord! I'm not going to flee. I'm not guilty of
anything. I haven't anything to flee for!"

"Just your life, my boy, just your life!"

"I'm not afraid of 'em."

"Oh yes you are!"

"Oh--well--if you look at it that way, probably I am! But I'm
not going to let a bunch of lunatics and gunmen drive me out of
the country that I and my ancestors made!"

Emma choked with the effort to think of something convincing;
Mary seemed without tears to be weeping; Sissy squeaked; Julian
and Lorinda started to speak and interrupted each other; and it
was the uninvited Mrs. Candy who, from the doorway, led off: "Now
isn't that like a man! Stubborn as mules. All of 'em. Every one.
And show-offs, the whole lot of 'em. Course you just wouldn't
stop and think how your womenfolks will feel if you get took off
and shot! You just stand in front of the locomotive and claim
that because you were on the section gang that built the track,
you got more right there than the engine has, and then when it's
gone over you and gone away, you expect us all to think what a
hero you were! Well, maybe some call it being a hero,
but--"

"Well, confound it all, all of you picking on me and trying to
get me all mixed up and not carry out my duty to the State as I
see it--"

"You're over sixty, Doremus. Maybe a lot of us can do our duty
better now from Canada than we can here--like Walt Trowbridge,"
besought Lorinda. Emma looked at her friend Lorinda with no
particular affection.

"But to let the Corpos steal the country and nobody protest!
No!"

"That's the kind of argument that sent a few million out to
die, to make the world safe for democracy and a cinch for
Fascism!" scoffed Buck.

"Dad! Come with us. Because we can't go without you. And I'm
getting scared here." Sissy sounded scared, too; Sissy the
unconquerable. "This afternoon Shad stopped me on the street and
wanted me to go out with him. He tickled my chin, the little
darling! But honestly, the way he smirked, as if he was so sure
of me--I got scared!"

"I'll get a shotgun and--" "Why, I'll kill the dirty--"
"Wait'll I get my hands on--" cried Doremus, Julian, and Buck,
all together, and glared at one another, then looked sheepish as
Foolish barked at the racket, and Mrs. Candy, leaning like a
frozen codfish against the door jamb, snorted, "Some more
locomotive-batters!"

Doremus laughed. For one only time in his life he showed
genius, for he consented: "All right. We'll go. But just imagine
that I'm a man of strong will power and I'm taking all night to
be convinced. We'll start tomorrow night." What he did not say
was that he planned, the moment he had his family safe in Canada,
with money in the bank and perhaps a job to amuse Sissy, to run
away from them and come back to his proper fight. He would at
least kill Shad before he got killed himself.

It was only a week before Christmas, a holiday always greeted
with good cheer and quantities of colored ribbons in the Jessup
household; and that wild day of preparing for flight had a queer
Christmas joyfulness. To dodge suspicion, Doremus spent most of
the time at the office, and a hundred times it seemed that
Staubmeyer was glancing at him with just the ruler-threatening
hidden ire he had used on whisperers and like young criminals in
school. But he took off two hours at lunch time, and he went home
early in the afternoon, and his long depression was gone in the
prospect of Canada and freedom, in an excited inspection of
clothes that was like preparation for a fishing trip. They worked
upstairs, behind drawn blinds, feeling like spies in an E.
Phillips Oppenheim story, beleagured in the dark and
stone-floored ducal bedroom of an ancient inn just beyond Grasse.
Downstairs, Mrs. Candy was pretentiously busy looking
normal--after their flight, she and the canary were to remain and
she was to be surprised when the M.M.'s reported that the Jessups
seemed to have escaped.

Doremus had drawn five hundred from each of the local banks,
late that afternoon, telling them that he was thinking of taking
an option on an apple orchard. He was too well-trained a domestic
animal to be raucously amused, but he could not help observing
that while he himself was taking on the flight to Egypt only all
the money he could get hold of, plus cigarettes, six
handkerchiefs, two extra pairs of socks, a comb, a toothbrush,
and the first volume of Spengler's Decline of the
West--decidedly it was not his favorite book, but one he had
been trying to make himself read for years, on train
journeys--while, in fact, he took nothing that he could not stuff
into his overcoat pockets, Sissy apparently had need of all her
newest lingerie and of a large framed picture of Julian, Emma of
a kodak album showing the three children from the ages of one to
twenty, David of his new model aeroplane, and Mary of her still,
dark hatred that was heavier to carry than many chests.

Julian and Lorinda were there to help them; Julian off in
corners with Sissy.

With Lorinda, Doremus had but one free moment . . . in the
old-fashioned guest-bathroom.

"Yes, but to leave you--I'd hoped somehow, by some miracle,
you and I could have maybe a month together, say in Monterey or
Venice or the Yellowstone. I hate it when life doesn't seem to
stick together and get somewhere and have some plan and
meaning."

"It's had meaning! No dictator can completely smother us now!
Come!"

"Good-bye, my Linda!"

Not even now did he alarm her by confessing that he planned to
come back, into danger.

Embracing beside an aged tin-lined bathtub with woodwork
painted a dreary brown, in a room which smelled slightly of gas
from an old hot-water heater--embracing in sunset-colored mist
upon a mountain top.

Darkness, edged wind, wickedly deliberate snow, and in it Buck
Titus boisterously cheerful in his veteran Nash, looking as
farmer-like as he could, in sealskin cap with rubbed bare patches
and an atrocious dogskin overcoat. Doremus thought of him again
as a Captain Charles King cavalryman chasing the Sioux across
blizzard-blinded prairies.

They packed alarmingly into the car; Mary beside Buck, the
driver; in the back, Doremus between Emma and Sissy; on the
floor, David and Foolish and the toy aeroplane indistinguishably
curled up together beneath a robe. Trunk rack and front fenders
were heaped with tarpaulin-covered suitcases.

"Lord, I wish I were going!" moaned Julian. "Look! Sis! Grand
spy-story idea! But I mean seriously: Send souvenir postcards to
my granddad--views of churches and so on--just sign 'em
'Jane'--and whatever you say about the church, I'll know you
really mean it about you and--Oh, damn all mystery! I want
you, Sissy!"

Mrs. Candy whisked a bundle in among the already intolerable
mess of baggage which promised to descend on Doremus's knees and
David's head, and she snapped, "Well, if you folks must go
flyin' around the country--It's a cocoanut layer cake." Savagely:
"Soon's you get around the corner, throw the fool thing in the
ditch if you want to!" She fled sobbing into the kitchen, where
Lorinda stood in the lighted doorway, silent, her trembling hands
out to them.

The car was already lurching in the snow before they had
sneaked through Fort Beulah by shadowy back-streets and started
streaking northward.

Sissy sang out cheerily, "Well, Christmas in Canada! Skittles
and beer and lots of holly!"

"Oh, do they have Santa Claus in Canada?" came David's voice,
wondering, childish, slightly muffled by lap robe and the furry
ears of Foolish.

"Of course they do, dearie!" Emma reassured him and, to
the grown-ups, "Now wasn't that the cutest thing!"

To Doremus, Sissy whispered, "Darn well ought to be cute. Took
me ten minutes to teach him to say it, this afternoon! Hold my
hand. I hope Buck knows how to drive!"

Buck Titus knew every back-road from Fort Beulah to the
border, preferably in filthy weather, like tonight. Beyond
Trianon he pulled the car up deep-rutted roads, on which you
would have to back if you were to pass anyone. Up grades on which
the car knocked and panted, into lonely hills, by a zigzag of
roads, they jerked toward Canada. Wet snow sheathed the
windshield, then froze, and Buck had to drive with his head
thrust out through the open window, and the blast came in and
circled round their stiff necks.

Doremus could see nothing save the back of Buck's twisted,
taut neck, and the icy windshield, most of the time. Just now and
then a light far below the level of the road indicated that they
were sliding along a shelf road, and if they skidded off, they
would keep going a hundred feet, two hundred feet,
downward--probably turning over and over. Once they did skid, and
while they panted in an eternity of four seconds, Buck yanked the
car up a bank beside the road, down to the left again, and
finally straight--speeding on as if nothing had happened, while
Doremus felt feeble in the knees.

For a long while he kept going rigid with fear, but he sank
into misery, too cold and deaf to feel anything except a slow
desire to vomit as the car lurched. Probably he slept--at least,
he awakened, and awakened to a sensation of pushing the car
anxiously up hill, as she bucked and stuttered in the effort to
make a slippery rise. Suppose the engine died--suppose the brakes
would not hold and they slid back downhill, reeling, bursting off
the road and down--A great many suppositions tortured him, hour
by hour.

Then he tried being awake and bright and helpful. He noticed
that the ice-lined windshield, illuminated from the light on the
snow ahead, was a sheet of diamonds. He noticed it, but he
couldn't get himself to think much of diamonds, even in
sheets.

He tried conversation.

"Cheer up. Breakfast at dawn--across the border!" he tried on
Sissy.

"Breakfast!" she said bitterly.

And they crunched on, in that moving coffin with only the
sheet of diamonds and Buck's silhouette alive in all the
world.

After unnumbered hours the car reared and tumbled and reared
again. The motor raced; its sound rose to an intolerable roaring;
yet the car seemed not to be moving. The motor stopped abruptly.
Buck cursed, popped his head back into the car like a turtle, and
the starter ground long and whiningly. The motor again roared,
again stopped. They could hear stiff branches rattling, hear
Foolish moaning in sleep. The car was a storm-menaced cabin in
the wilderness. The silence seemed waiting, as they were
waiting.

"Strouble?" said Doremus.

"Stuck. No traction. Hit a drift of wet snow--drainage from a
busted culvert, I sh' think. Hell! Have to get out and take a
look."

Outside the car, as Doremus crept down from the slippery
running-board, it was cold in a vicious wind. He was so stiff he
could scarcely stand.

As people do, feeling important and advisory, Doremus looked
at the drift with an electric torch, and Sissy looked at the
drift with the torch, and Buck impatiently took the torch away
from them and looked twice.

"Get some--" and "Brush would help," said Sissy and Buck
together, while Doremus rubbed his chilly ears.

They three trotted back and forth with fragments of brush,
laying it in front of the wheels, while Mary politely asked from
within, "Can I help?" and no one seemed particularly to have
answered her.

The headlights picked out an abandoned shack beside the road;
an unpainted gray pine cabin with broken window glass and no
door. Emma, sighing her way out of the car and stepping through
the lumpy snow as delicately as a pacer at a horse show, said
humbly, "That little house there--maybe I could go in and make
some hot coffee on the alcohol stove--didn't have room for a
thermos. Hot coffee, Dormouse?"

To Doremus she sounded, just now, not at all like a wife, but
as sensible as Mrs. Candy.

When the car did kick its way up on the pathway of twigs and
stand panting safely beyond the drift, they had, in the sheltered
shack, coffee with slabs of Mrs. Candy's voluptuous cocoanut
cake. Doremus pondered, "This is a nice place. I like this place.
It doesn't bounce or skid. I don't want to leave this place."

He did. The secure immobility of the shack was behind them,
dark miles behind, and they were again pitching and rolling and
being sick and inescapably chilly. David was alternately crying
and going back to sleep. Foolish woke up to cough inquiringly and
returned to his dream of rabbiting. And Doremus was sleeping, his
head swaying like a masthead in long rollers, his shoulder
against Emma's, his hand warm about Sissy's, and his soul in
nameless bliss.

He roused to a half-dawn filmy with snow. The car was standing
in what seemed to be a crossroads hamlet, and Buck was examining
a map by the light of the electric torch.

"Got anywhere yet?" Doremus whispered.

"Just a few miles to the border."

"Anybody stopped us?"

"Nope. Oh, we'll make it, all right, o' man."

Out of East Berkshire, Buck took not the main road to the
border but an old wood lane so little used that the ruts were
twin snakes. Though Doremus said nothing, the others felt his
intensity, his anxiety that was like listening for an enemy in
the dark. David sat up, the blue motor robe about him. Foolish
started, snorted, looked offended but, catching the spirit of the
moment, comfortingly laid a paw on Doremus's knee and insisted on
shaking hands, over and over, as gravely as a Venetian senator or
an undertaker.

They dropped into the dimness of a tree-walled hollow. A
searchlight darted, and rested hotly on them, so dazzling them
that Buck almost ran off the road.

"Confound it," he said gently. No one else said anything.

He crawled up to the light, which was mounted on a platform in
front of a small shelter hut. Two Minute Men stood out in the
road, dripping with radiance from the car. They were young and
rural, but they had efficient repeating rifles.

"Where you headed for?" demanded the elder, good-naturedly
enough.

"Montreal, where we live." Buck showed his Canadian license. .
. . Gasoline motor and electric light, yet Doremus saw the
frontier guard as a sentry in 1864, studying a pass by lantern
light, beside a farm wagon in which hid General Joe Johnston's
spies disguised as plantation hands.

"I guess it's all right. Seems in order. But we've had some
trouble with refugees. You'll have to wait till the
Battalion-Leader comes--maybe 'long about noon."

"Yuh, I've heard that one before! And maybe it's true, this
time. But afraid you'll have to wait for the Bat. You folks can
come in and set by the fire, if you want to."

"But we've got to--"

"You heard what I said!" The M.M.'s were fingering their
rifles.

"All right. But tell you what we'll do. We'll go back to East
Berkshire and get some breakfast and a wash and come back here.
Noon, you said?"

"Okay! And say, Brother, it does seem kind of funny, your
taking this back road, when there's a first-rate highway. S'
long. Be good. . . . Just don't try it again! The Bat might be
here next time--and he ain't a farmer like you or me!"

The refugees, as they drove away, had an uncomfortable feeling
that the guards were laughing at them.

Three border posts they tried, and at three posts they were
turned back.

"Well?" said Buck.

"Yes. I guess so. Back home. My turn to drive," said Doremus
wearily.

The humiliation of retreat was the worse in that none of the
guards had troubled to do more than laugh at them. They were
trapped too tightly for the trappers to worry. Doremus's only
clear emotion as, tails between their legs, they back-tracked to
Shad Ledue's sneer and to Mrs. Candy's "Well, I never!"
was regret that he had not shot one guard, at least, and he
raged:

"Now I know why men like John Brown became crazy killers!"

24

He could not decide whether Emil Staubmeyer, and through him
Shad Ledue, knew that he had tried to escape. Did Staubmeyer
really look more knowing, or did he just imagine it? What the
deuce had Emil meant when he said, "I hear the roads aren't so
good up north--not so good!" Whether they knew or not, it was
grinding that he should have to shiver lest an illiterate
roustabout like Shad Ledue find out that he desired to go to
Canada, while a ruler-slapper like Staubmeyer, a Squeers with
certificates in "pedagogy," should now be able to cuff grown men
instead of urchins and should be editor of the Informer!
Doremus's Informer! Staubmeyer! That human
blackboard!

Daily Doremus found it more cramping, more instantly stirring
to fury, to write anything mentioning Windrip. His private
office--the cheerfully rattling linotype room--the shouting
pressroom with its smell of ink that to him hitherto had been
like the smell of grease paint to an actor--they were hateful
now, and choking. Not even Lorinda's faith, not even Sissy's
jibes and Buck's stories, could rouse him to hope.

He rejoiced the more, therefore, when his son Philip
telephoned him from Worcester: "Be home Sunday? Merilla's in New
York, gadding, and I'm all alone here. Thought I'd just drive up
for the day and see how things are in your neck of the
woods."

"Come on! Splendid! So long since we've seen you. I'll have
your mother start a pot of beans right away!"

Doremus was happy. Not for some time did his cursed
two-way-mindedness come to weaken his joy, as he wondered whether
it wasn't just a myth held over from boyhood that Philip really
cared so much for Emma's beans and brown bread; and wondered just
why it was that Up-to-Date Americans like Philip always used the
long-distance telephone rather than undergo the dreadful toil of
dictating a letter a day or two earlier. It didn't really seem so
efficient, the old-fashioned village editor reflected, to spend
seventy-five cents on a telephone call in order to save five
cents' worth of time.

"Oh hush! Anyway, I'll be delighted to see the boy! I'll bet
there isn't a smarter young lawyer in Worcester. There's one
member of the family that's a real success!"

He was a little shocked when Philip came, like a one-man
procession, into the living room, late on Saturday afternoon. He
had been forgetting how bald this upstanding young advocate was
growing even at thirty-four. And it seemed to him that Philip was
a little heavy and senatorial in speech and a bit too
cordial.

"By Jove, Dad, you don't know how good it is to be back in the
old digs. Mother and the girls upstairs? By Jove, sir, that was a
horrible business, the killing of poor Fowler. Horrible! I was
simply horrified. There must have been a mistake somewhere,
because Judge Swan has a wonderful reputation for
scrupulousness."

"There was no mistake. Swan is a fiend. Literally!" Doremus
sounded less paternal than when he had first bounded up to shake
hands with the beloved prodigal.

"Really? We must talk it over. I'll see if there can't be a
stricter investigation. Swan? Really! We'll certainly go into the
whole business. But first I must just skip upstairs and give
Mammy a good smack, and Mary and Little Sis."

And that was the last time that Philip mentioned Effingham
Swan or any "stricter investigation" of the acts thereof. All
afternoon he was relentlessly filial and fraternal, and he smiled
like an automobile salesman when Sissy griped at him, "What's the
idea of all the tender hand-dusting, Philco?"

Doremus and he were not alone till nearly midnight.

They sat upstairs in the sacred study. Philip lighted one of
Doremus's excellent cigars as though he were a cinema actor
playing the role of a man lighting an excellent cigar, and
breathed amiably:

"Well, sir, this is an excellent cigar! It certainly is
excellent!"

"Why not?"

"Oh, I just mean--I was just appreciating it--"

"What is it, Phil? There's something on your mind. Shoot! Not
rowing with Merilla, are you?"

"Certainly not! Most certainly not! Oh, I don't approve of
everything Merry does--she's a little extravagant--but she's got
a heart of gold, and let me tell you, Pater, there isn't a young
society woman in Worcester that makes a nicer impression on
everybody, especially at nice dinner parties."

"Well then? Let's have it, Phil. Something serious?"

"Ye-es, I'm afraid there is. Look, Dad. . . . Oh, do sit down
and be comfortable! . . . I've been awfully perturbed to hear
that you've, uh, that you're in slightly bad odor with some of
the authorities."

"You mean the Corpos?"

"Naturally! Who else?"

"Maybe I don't recognize 'em as authorities."

"Oh, listen, Pater, please don't joke tonight! I'm serious. As
a matter fact, I hear you're more than just 'slightly' in wrong
with them."

"And who may your informant be?"

"Oh, just letters--old school friends. Now you aren't
really pro-Corpo, are you?"

"How did you ever guess?"

"Well, I've been--I didn't vote for Windrip, personally, but I
begin to see where I was wrong. I can see now that he has not
only great personal magnetism, but real constructive power--real
sure-enough statesmanship. Some say it's Lee Sarason's doing, but
don't you believe it for a minute. Look at all Buzz did back in
his home state, before he ever teamed up with Sarason! And some
say Windrip is crude. Well, so were Lincoln and Jackson. Now what
I think of Windrip--"

"The only thing you ought to think of Windrip is that his
gangsters murdered your fine brother-in-law! And plenty of other
men just as good. Do you condone such murders?"

"No! Certainly not! How can you suggest such a thing, Dad! No
one abhors violence more than I do. Still, you can't make an
omelet without breaking eggs--"

"Hell and damnation!"

"Why, Pater!"

"Don't call me 'Pater'! If I ever hear that 'can't make an
omelet' phrase again, I'll start doing a little murder myself!
It's used to justify every atrocity under every despotism,
Fascist or Nazi or Communist or American labor war. Omelet! Eggs!
By God, sir, men's souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants
to break!"

"Oh, sorry, sir. I guess maybe the phrase is a little
shopworn! I just mean to say--I'm just trying to figure this
situation out realistically!"

"'Realistically'! That's another buttered bun to excuse
murder!"

"But honestly, you know--horrible things do happen, thanks to
the imperfection of human nature, but you can forgive the means
if the end is a rejuvenated nation that--"

"I can do nothing of the kind! I can never forgive evil and
lying and cruel means, and still less can I forgive fanatics that
use that for an excuse! If I may imitate Romain Rolland, a
country that tolerates evil means--evil manners, standards of
ethics--for a generation, will be so poisoned that it never will
have any good end. I'm just curious, but do you know how
perfectly you're quoting every Bolshevik apologist that sneers at
decency and kindness and truthfulness in daily dealings as
'bourgeois morality'? I hadn't understood that you'd gone quite
so Marxo-materialistic!"

"I! Marxian! Good God!" Doremus was pleased to see that he had
stirred his son out of his if-your-honor-please smugness. "Why,
one of the things I most admire about the Corpos is that, as I
know, absolutely--I have reliable information from
Washington--they have saved us from a simply ghastly invasion by
red agents of Moscow--Communists pretending to be decent
labor-leaders!"

"Not really!" (Had the fool forgotten that his father was a
newspaperman and not likely to be impressed by "reliable
information from Washington"?)

"Really! And to be realistic--sorry, sir, if you don't like
the word, but to be--to be--"

"In fact, to be realistic!"

"Well, yes, then!"

(Doremus recalled such tempers in Philip from years ago. Had
he been wise, after all, to restrain himself from the domestic
pleasure of licking the brat?)

"The whole point is that Windrip, or anyway the Corpos, are
here to stay, Pater, and we've got to base our future
actions not on some desired Utopia but on what we really and
truly have. And think of what they've actually done! Just, for
example, how they've removed the advertising billboards from the
highways, and ended unemployment, and their simply stupendous
feat in getting rid of all crime!"

"Good God!"

"Pardon me--what y' say, Dad?"

"Nothing! Nothing! Go on!"

"But I begin to see now that the Corpo gains haven't been just
material but spiritual."

"Eh?"

"Really! They've revitalized the whole country. Formerly we
had gotten pretty sordid, just thinking about material
possessions and comforts--about electric refrigeration and
television and air-conditioning. Kind of lost the sturdiness that
characterized our pioneer ancestors. Why, ever so many young men
were refusing to take military drill, and the discipline and will
power and good-fellowship that you only get from military
training--Oh, pardon me! I forgot you were a pacifist."

Doremus grimly muttered, "Not any more!"

"Of course there must be any number of things we can't agree
on, Dad. But after all, as a publicist you ought to listen to the
Voice of Youth."

"You? Youth? You're not youth. You're two thousand years old,
mentally. You date just about 100 B.C. in your fine new
imperialistic theories!"

"No, but you must listen, Dad! Why do you suppose I came clear
up here from Worcester just to see you?"

"God only knows!"

"I want to make myself clear. Before Windrip, we'd been lying
down in America, while Europe was throwing off all her
bonds--both monarchy and this antiquated
parliamentary-democratic-liberal system that really means rule by
professional politicians and by egotistic 'intellectuals.' We've
got to catch up to Europe again--got to expand--it's the rule of
life. A nation, like a man, has to go ahead or go backward.
Always!"

"I know, Phil. I used to write that same thing in those same
words, back before 1914!"

"Did you? Well, anyway--Got to expand! Why, what we ought to
do is to grab all of Mexico, and maybe Central America, and a
good big slice of China. Why, just on their own behalf we
ought to do it, misgoverned the way they are! Maybe I'm wrong
but--"

"Impossible!"

"--Windrip and Sarason and Dewey Haik and Macgoblin, all those
fellows, they're big--they're making me stop and think!
And now to come down to my errand here--"

"You think I ought to run the Informer according to
Corpo theology!"

"Why--why yes! That was approximately what I was going to say.
(I just don't see why you haven't been more reasonable about this
whole thing--you with your quick mind!) After all, the time for
selfish individualism is gone. We've got to have mass action. One
for all and all for one--"

"Philip, would you mind telling me what the deuce you're
really heading toward? Cut the cackle!"

"Well, since you insist--to 'cut the cackle,' as you call
it--not very politely, seems to me, seeing I've taken the trouble
to come clear up from Worcester!--I have reliable information
that you're going to get into mighty serious trouble if you don't
stop opposing--or at least markedly failing to support--the
government."

"All right. What of it? It's my serious trouble!"

"That's just the point! It isn't! I do think that just for
once in your life you might think of Mother and the girls,
instead of always of your own selfish 'ideas' that you're so
proud of! In a crisis like this, it just isn't funny any longer
to pose as a quaint 'liberal.'"

Doremus's voice was like a firecracker. "Cut the cackle, I
told you! What you after? What's the Corpo gang to you?"

"I have been approached in regard to the very high honor of an
assistant military judgeship, but your attitude, as my
father--"

"Philip, I think, I rather think, that I give you my parental
curse not so much because you are a traitor as because you have
become a stuffed shirt! Good-night."

25

Holidays were invented by the devil, to coax people into the
heresy that happiness can be won by taking thought. What was
planned as a rackety day for David's first Christmas with his
grandparents was, they saw too well, perhaps David's last
Christmas with them. Mary had hidden her weeping, but the day
before Christmas, when Shad Ledue tramped in to demand of Doremus
whether Karl Pascal had ever spoken to him of Communism, Mary
came on Shad in the hall, stared at him, raised her hand like a
boxing cat, and said with dreadful quietness, "You murderer! I
shall kill you and kill Swan!"

For once Shad did not look amused.

To make the holiday as good an imitation of mirth as possible,
they were very noisy, but their holly, their tinsel stars on a
tall pine tree, their family devotion in a serene old house in a
little town, was no different at heart from despairing
drunkenness in the city night. Doremus reflected that it might
have been just as well for all of them to get drunk and let
themselves go, elbows on slopped café tables, as to toil
at this pretense of domestic bliss. He now had another thing for
which to hate the Corpos--for stealing the secure affection of
Christmas.

For noon dinner, Louis Rotenstern was invited, because he was
a lorn bachelor and, still more, because he was a Jew, now
insecure and snubbed and threatened in an insane dictatorship.
(There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that
the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure
of the cruelty and silliness of the régime under which
they live, so that even a commercial-minded money-fondling
heavily humorous Jew burgher like Rotenstern is still a sensitive
meter of barbarism.) After dinner came Buck Titus, David's most
favorite person, bearing staggering amounts of Woolworth tractors
and fire engines and a real bow-and-arrow, and he was raucously
insisting that Mrs. Candy dance with him what he not very
precisely called "the light fantastic," when the hammering
sounded at the door.

"What's the idea? What d'you want of him? What's the charge?"
demanded Buck, still standing with his arm about Mrs. Candy's
embarrassed waist.

"Dunno's there be any charges. Just ordered to headquarters
for questioning. District Commissioner Reek in town. Just astin'
few people a few questions. Come on, you!"

The hilarious celebrants did not, as they had planned, go out
to Lorinda's tavern for skiing. Next day they heard that
Rotenstern had been taken to the concentration camp at Trianon,
along with that crabbed old Tory, Raymond Pridewell, the hardware
dealer.

Both imprisonments were incredible. Rotenstern had been too
meek. And if Pridewell had not ever been meek, if he had
constantly and testily and loudly proclaimed that he had not
cared for Ledue as a hired man and now cared even less for him as
a local governor, yet--why, Pridewell was a sacred institution.
As well think of dragging the brownstone Baptist Church to
prison.

Later, a friend of Shad Ledue took over Rotenstern's shop.

It can happen here, meditated Doremus. It could happen
to him. How soon? Before he should be arrested, he must make
amends to his conscience by quitting the Informer.

Professor Victor Loveland, once a classicist of Isaiah
College, having been fired from a labor camp for incompetence in
teaching arithmetic to lumberjacks, was in town, with wife and
babies, on his way to a job clerking in his uncle's slate quarry
near Fair Haven. He called on Doremus and was hysterically
cheerful. He called on Clarence Little--"dropped in to visit with
him," Clarence would have said. Now that twitchy, intense
jeweler, Clarence, who had been born on a Vermont farm and had
supported his mother till she died when he was thirty, had longed
to go to college and, especially, to study Greek. Though Loveland
was his own age, in the mid-thirties, he looked on him as a
combination of Keats and Liddell. His greatest moment had been
hearing Loveland read Homer.

Loveland was leaning on the counter. "Gone ahead with your
Latin grammar, Clarence?"

"Golly, Professor, it just doesn't seem worth while any more.
I guess I'm kind of a weak sister, anyway, but I find that these
days it's about all I can do to keep going."

"Me too! And don't call me 'Professor.' I'm a timekeeper in a
slate quarry. What a life!"

They had not noticed the clumsy-looking man in plain clothes
who had just come in. Presumably he was a customer. But he
grumbled, "So you two pansies don't like the way things go
nowadays! Don't suppose you like the Corpos! Don't think much of
the Chief!" He jabbed his thumb into Loveland's ribs so painfully
that Loveland yelped, "I don't think about him at all!"

"Oh, you don't, eh? Well, you two fairies can come along to
the courthouse with me!"

"And who may you be?"

"Oh, just an ensign in the M.M.'s, that's all!"

He had an automatic pistol.

Loveland was not beaten much, because he managed to keep his
mouth shut. But Little was so hysterical that they laid him on a
kitchen table and decorated his naked back with forty slashes of
a steel ramrod. They had found that Clarence wore yellow silk
underwear, and the M.M.'s from factory and plowland
laughed--particularly one broad young inspector who was rumored
to have a passionate friendship with a battalion-leader from
Nashua who was fat, eyeglassed, and high-pitched of voice.

Little had to be helped into the truck that took Loveland and
him to the Trianon concentration camp. One eye was closed and so
surrounded with bruised flesh that the M.M. driver said it looked
like a Spanish omelet.

The truck had an open body, but they could not escape, because
the three prisoners on this trip were chained hand to hand. They
lay on the floor of the truck. It was snowing.

The third prisoner was not much like Loveland or Little. His
name was Ben Trippen. He had been a mill hand for Medary Cole. He
cared no more about the Greek language than did a baboon, but he
did care for his six children. He had been arrested for trying to
strike Cole and for cursing the Corpo régime when Cole had
reduced his wages from nine dollars a week (in pre-Corpo
currency) to seven-fifty.

As to Loveland's wife and babies, Lorinda took them in till
she could pass the hat and collect enough to send them back to
Mrs. Loveland's family on a rocky farm in Missouri. But then
things went better. Mrs. Loveland was favored by the Greek
proprietor of a lunch-room and got work washing dishes and
otherwise pleasing the proprietor, who brilliantined his
mustache.

The county administration, in a proclamation signed by Emil
Staubmeyer, announced that they were going to regulate the
agriculture on the submarginal land high up on Mount Terror. As a
starter, half-a-dozen of the poorer families were moved into the
large, square, quiet, old house of that large, square, quiet, old
farmer, Henry Veeder, cousin of Doremus Jessup. These poorer
families had many children, a great many, so that there were four
or five persons bedded on the floor in every room of the home
where Henry and his wife had placidly lived alone since their own
children had grown. Henry did not like it, and said so, not very
tactfully, to the M.M.'s herding the refugees. What was worse,
the dispossessed did not like it any better. "'Tain't much, but
we got a house of our own. Dunno why we should git shoved in on
Henry," said one. "Don't expect other folks to bother me, and
don't expect to bother other folks. Never did like that fool kind
of yellow color Henry painted his barn, but guess that's his
business."

So Henry and two of the regulated agriculturists were taken to
the Trianon concentration camp, and the rest remained in Henry's
house, doing nothing but finish up Henry's large larder and wait
for orders.

"And before I'm sent to join Henry and Karl and Loveland, I'm
going to clear my skirts," Doremus vowed, along in late
January.

He marched in to see County Commissioner Ledue.

"I want to quit the Informer. Staubmeyer has learned
all I can teach him."

"Staubmeyer? Oh! You mean Assistant Commissioner
Staubmeyer!"

"Chuck it, will you? We're not on parade, and we're not
playing soldiers. Mind if I sit down?"

"Don't look like you cared a hell of a lot whether I mind or
not! But I can tell you, right here and now, Jessup, without any
monkey business about it, you're not going to leave your job. I
guess I could find enough grounds for sending you to Trianon for
about a million years, with ninety lashes, but--you've always
been so stuck on yourself as such an all-fired honest editor, it
kind of tickles me to watch you kissing the Chief's foot--and
mine!"

"I'll do no more of it! That's certain! And I admit that I
deserve your scorn for ever having done it!"

"Well, isn't that elegant! But you'll do just what I tell you
to, and like it! Jessup, I suppose you think I had a swell time
when I was your hired man! Watching you and your old woman and
the girls go off on a picnic while I--oh, I was just your hired
man, with dirt in my ears, your dirt! I could stay home and clean
up the basement!"

"Maybe we didn't want you along, Shad! Good-morning!"

Shad laughed. There was a sound of the gates of Trianon
concentration camp in that laughter.

It was really Sissy who gave Doremus his lead.

He drove to Hanover to see Shad's superior, District
Commissioner John Sullivan Reek, that erstwhile jovial and
red-faced politician. He was admitted after only half an hour's
waiting. He was shocked to see how pale and hesitant and
frightened Reek had become. But the Commissioner tried to be
authoritative.

"I hope so. Governor, I find I'm of no use on the
Informer, at Fort Beulah. As you probably know, I've been
breaking in Emil Staubmeyer as my successor. Well, he's quite
competent to take hold now, and I want to quit. I'm really just
in his way."

"Why don't you stick around and see what you can still do to
help him? There'll be little jobs cropping up from time to
time."

"Because it's got on my nerves to take orders where I used to
give 'em for so many years. You can appreciate that, can't
you?"

"My God, can I appreciate it? And how! Well, I'll think it
over. You wouldn't mind writing little pieces for my own little
sheet, at home? I own part of a paper there."

"No! Sure! Delighted!"

("Does this mean that Reek believes the Corpo tyranny is going
to blow up, in a revolution, so that he's beginning to trim? Or
just that he's fighting to keep from being thrown out?")

"Yes, I can see how you might feel, Brother Jessup."

"Thanks! Would you mind giving me a note to County
Commissioner Ledue, telling him to let me out, without
prejudice?--making it pretty strong?"

"No. Not a bit. Just wait a minute, ole fellow; I'll write it
right now."

Doremus made as little ceremony as possible of leaving the
Informer, which had been his throne for thirty-seven
years. Staubmeyer was patronizing, Doc Itchitt looked quizzical,
but the chapel, headed by Dan Wilgus, shook hands profusely. And
so, at sixty-two, stronger and more eager than he had been in all
his life, Doremus had nothing to do more important than eating
breakfast and telling his grandson stories about the
elephant.

But that lasted less than a week. Avoiding suspicion from Emma
and Sissy and even from Buck and Lorinda, he took Julian
aside:

"Look here, boy. I think it's time now for me to begin doing a
little high treason. (Heaven's sake keep all of this under your
hat--don't even tip off Sissy!) I guess you know, the Communists
are too theocratic for my tastes. But looks to me as though they
have more courage and devotion and smart strategy than anybody
since the Early Christian Martyrs--whom they also resemble in
hairiness and a fondness for catacombs. I want to get in touch
with 'em and see if there's any dirty work at the crossroads I
can do for 'em--say distributing a few Early Christian tracts by
St. Lenin. But of course, theoretically, the Communists have all
been imprisoned. Could you get to Karl Pascal, in Trianon, and
find out whom I could see?"

Said Julian, "I think I could. Dr. Olmsted gets called in
there sometimes on cases--they hate him, because he hates them,
but still, their camp doctor is a drunken bum, and they have to
have a real doc in when one of their warders busts his wrist
beating up some prisoner. I'll try, sir."

Two days afterward Julian returned.

"My God, what a sewer that Trianon place is! I'd waited for
Olmsted before, in the car, but I never had the nerve to butt
inside. The buildings--they were nice buildings, quite pretty,
when the girls' school had them. Now the fittings are all torn
out, and they've put up wallboard partitions for cells, and the
whole place stinks of carbolic acid and excrement, and the
air--there isn't any--you feel as if you were nailed up in a
box--I don't know how anybody lives in one of those cells for an
hour--and yet there's six men bunked in a cell twelve feet by
ten, with a ceiling only seven feet high, and no light except a
twenty-five watt, I guess it is, bulb in the ceiling--you
couldn't read by it. But they get out for exercise two hours a
day--walk around and around the courtyard--they're all so
stooped, and they all look so ashamed, as if they'd had the
defiance just licked out of 'em--even Karl a little, and you
remember how proud and sort of sardonic he was. Well, I got to
see him, and he says to get in touch with this man--here, I wrote
it down--and for God's sake, burn it up soon as you've memorized
it!"

"Was he--had they--?"

"Oh, yes, they've beaten him, all right. He wouldn't talk
about it. But there was a scar right across his cheek, from his
temple right down to his chin. And I had just a glimpse of Henry
Veeder. Remember how he looked--like an oak tree? Now he twitches
all the time, and jumps and gasps when he hears a sudden sound.
He didn't know me. I don't think he'd know anybody."

Doremus announced to his family and told it loudly in Gath
that he was still looking for an option on an apple orchard to
which they might retire, and he journeyed southward, with pajamas
and a toothbrush and the first volume of Spengler's Decline of
the West in a briefcase.

The address given by Karl Pascal was that of a most
gentlemanly dealer in altar cloths and priestly robes, who had
his shop and office over a tea room in Hartford, Connecticut. He
talked about the cembalo and the spinetta di serenata and the
music of Palestrina for an hour before he sent Doremus on to a
busy engineer constructing a dam in New Hampshire, who sent him
to a tailor in a side-street shop in Lynn, who at last sent him
to northern Connecticut and to the Eastern headquarters of what
was left of the Communists in America.

Still carrying his little briefcase he walked up a greasy
hill, impassable to any motorcar, and knocked at the faded green
door of a squat New England farm cottage masked in wintry old
lilac bushes and spiræa shrubs. A stringy farm wife opened
and looked hostile.

"I'd like to speak to Mr. Ailey, Mr. Bailey, or Mr.
Cailey."

"None of 'em home. You'll have to come again."

"Then I'll wait. What else should one do, these days?"

"All right. Cmin."

"Thanks. Give them this letter."

(The tailor had warned him, "It vill all sount very foolish,
the passvorts und everyt'ing, but if any of the central committee
gets caught--" He made a squirting sound and drew his scissors
across his throat.)

Doremus sat now in a tiny hall off a flight of stairs steep as
the side of a roof; a hall with sprigged wall paper and Currier
& Ives prints, and black-painted wooden rocking chairs with
calico cushions. There was nothing to read but a Methodist hymnal
and a desk dictionary. He knew the former by heart, and anyway,
he always loved reading dictionaries--often had one seduced him
from editorial-writing. Happily he sat conning:

Pherecratean. n. A choriambic trimeter catalectic, or
catalectic glyconic; composed of a spondee, a choriambus, and a
catalectic syllable.

"Well! I never knew any of that before! I wonder if I
do now?" thought Doremus contentedly, before he realized that
glowering from a very narrow doorway was a very broad man with
wild gray hair and a patch over one eye. Doremus recognized him
from pictures. He was Bill Atterbury, miner, longshoreman,
veteran I.W.W. leader, old A. F. of L. strike-leader, five years
in San Quentin and five honored years in Moscow, and reputed now
to be the secretary of the illegal Communist Party.

"I'm Mr. Ailey. What can I do for you?" Bill demanded.

He led Doremus into a musty back room where, at a table which
was probably mahogany underneath the scars and the clots of dirt,
sat a squat man with kinky tow-colored hair and with deep
wrinkles in the thick pale skin of his face, and a slender young
elegant who suggested Park Avenue.

"Howryuh?" said Mr. Bailey, in a Russian-Jewish accent. Of him
Doremus knew nothing save that he was not named Bailey.

"Morning," snapped Mr. Cailey--whose name was Elphrey, if
Doremus guessed rightly, and who was the son of a millionaire
private banker, the brother of one explorer, one bishop's wife,
and one countess, and himself a former teacher of economics in
the University of California.

Doremus tried to explain himself to these hard-eyed,
quick-glancing plotters of ruin.

"Are you willing to become a Party member, in the extremely
improbable case that they accept you, and to take orders, any
orders, without question?" asked Elphrey, so suavely.

"Do you mean, Am I willing to kill and steal?"

"You've been reading detective stories about the 'Reds'! No.
What you'd have to do would be much more difficult than the
amusement of using a tommy-gun. Would you be willing to forget
you ever were a respectable newspaper editor, giving orders, and
walk through the snow, dressed like a bum, to distribute
seditious pamphlets--even if, personally, you should believe the
pamphlets were of no slightest damn good to the Cause?"

"Why, I--I don't know. Seems to me that as a newspaperman of
quite a little training--"

"Hell! Our only trouble is keeping out the 'trained
newspapermen'! What we need is trained bill-posters that like the
smell of flour paste and hate sleeping. And--but you're a little
old for this--crazy fanatics that go out and start strikes,
knowing they'll get beaten up and thrown in the bull pen."

"No, I guess I--Look here. I'm sure Walt Trowbridge will be
joining up with the Socialists and some of the left-wing radical
ex-Senators and the Farmer-Laborites and so on--"

Bill Atterbury guffawed. It was a tremendous, somehow
terrifying blast. "Yes, I'm sure they'll join up--all the
dirty, sneaking, half-headed, reformist Social Fascists like
Trowbridge, that are doing the work of the capitalists and
working for war against Soviet Russia without even having sense
enough to know they're doing it and to collect good pay for their
crookedness!"

"I admire Trowbridge!" snarled Doremus.

"You would!"

Elphrey rose, almost cordial, and dismissed Doremus with, "Mr.
Jessup, I was brought up in a sound bourgeois household myself,
unlike these two roughnecks, and I appreciate what you're trying
to do, even if they don't. I imagine that your rejection of us is
even firmer than our rejection of you!"

"But I just wonder if Walt Trowbridge won't be chasing out
Buzz Windrip while you boys are still arguing about whether
Comrade Trotzky was once guilty of saying mass facing the north?
Good-day!" said Doremus.

When he recounted it to Julian, two days later, and Julian
puzzled, "I wonder whether you won or they did?" Doremus
asserted, "I don't think anybody won--except the ants! Anyway,
now I know that man is not to be saved by black bread alone but
by everything that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord our
God. . . . Communists, intense and narrow; Yankees, tolerant and
shallow; no wonder a Dictator can keep us separate and all
working for him!"

Even in the 1930's, when it was radiantly believed that movies
and the motorcar and glossy magazines had ended the provinciality
of all the larger American villages, in such communities as Fort
Beulah all the retired business men who could not afford to go to
Europe or Florida or California, such as Doremus, were as aimless
as an old dog on Sunday afternoon with the family away. They
poked uptown to the shops, the hotel lobbies, the railway
station, and at the barber shop were pleased rather than
irritated when they had to wait a quarter-hour for the tri-weekly
shave. There were no cafés as there would have been in
Continental Europe, and no club save the country club, and that
was chiefly a sanctuary for the younger people in the evening and
late afternoons.

The superior Doremus Jessup, the bookman, was almost as dreary
in retirement as Banker Crowley would have been.

He did pretend to play golf, but he could not see any
particular point in stopping a good walk to wallop small balls
and, worse, the links were now bright with M.M. uniforms. And he
hadn't enough brass, as no doubt Medary Cole would have, to feel
welcome hour on hour in the Hotel Wessex lobby.

He stayed in his third-story study and read as long as his
eyes would endure it. But he irritably felt Emma's irritation and
Mrs. Candy's ire at having a man around the house all day. Yes!
He'd get what he could for the house and for what small share in
Informer stock the government had left him when they had
taken it over, and go--well, just go--the Rockies or anywhere
that was new.

But he realized that Emma did not at all wish to go new
places; and realized that the Emma to whose billowy warmth it had
been comforting to come home after the office, bored him and was
bored by him when he was always there. The only difference was
that she did not seem capable of admitting that one might,
without actual fiendishness or any signs of hot-footing it for
Reno, be bored by one's faithful spouse.

"Why don't you drive out and see Buck or Lorinda?" she
suggested.

"Don't you ever get a little jealous of my girl, Linda?" he
said, very lightly--because he very heavily wanted to know.

She laughed. "You? At your age? As if anybody thought
you could be a lover!"

Well, Lorinda thought so, he raged, and promptly he did "drive
out and see her," a little easier in mind about his divided
loyalties.

Only once did he go back to the Informer office.

Staubmeyer was not in sight, and it was evident that the real
editor was that sly bumpkin, Doc Itchitt, who didn't even rise at
Doremus's entrance nor listen when Doremus gave his opinion of
the new make-up of the rural-correspondence pages.

That was an apostasy harder to endure than Shad Ledue's, for
Shad had always been rustically certain that Doremus was a fool,
almost as bad as real "city folks," while Doc Itchitt had once
appreciated the tight joints and smooth surfaces and sturdy bases
of Doremus's craftsmanship.

Day on day he waited. So much of a revolution for so many
people is nothing but waiting. That is one reason why tourists
rarely see anything but contentment in a crushed population.
Waiting, and its brother death, seem so contented.

For several days now, in late February, Doremus had noticed
the insurance man. He said he was a Mr. Dimick; a Mr. Dimick of
Albany. He was a gray and tasteless man, in gray and dusty and
wrinkled clothes, and his pop-eyes stared with meaningless
fervor. All over town you met him, at the four drugstores, at the
shoe-shine parlor, and he was always droning, "My name is
Dimick--Mr. Dimick of Albany--Albany, New York. I wonder if I can
interest you in a wonnerful new form of life-insurance policy.
Wonnerful!" But he didn't sound as though he himself thought it
was very wonnerful.

He was a pest.

He was always dragging himself into some unwelcoming shop, and
yet he seemed to sell few policies, if any.

Not for two days did Doremus perceive that Mr. Dimick of
Albany managed to meet him an astonishing number of times a day.
As he came out of the Wessex, he saw Mr. Dimick leaning against a
lamppost, ostentatiously not looking his way, yet three minutes
later and two blocks away, Mr. Dimick trailed after him into the
Vert Mont Pool & Tobacco Headquarters, and listened to
Doremus's conversation with Tom Aiken about fish hatcheries.

Doremus was suddenly cold. He made it a point to sneak uptown
that evening and saw Mr. Dimick talking to the driver of a
Beulah-Montpelier bus with an intensity that wasn't in the least
gray. Doremus glared. Mr. Dimick looked at him with watery eyes,
croaked, "Devenin', Mr. D'remus; like t' talk t' you about
insurance some time when you got the time," and shuffled
away.

Later, Doremus took out and cleaned his revolver, said, "Oh,
rats!" and put it away. He heard a ring as he did so, and went
downstairs to find Mr. Dimick sitting on the oak hat rack in the
hall, rubbing his hat.

"I'd like to talk to you, if y'ain't too busy," whined Mr.
Dimick.

"All right. Go in there. Sit down."

"Anybody hear us?"

"No! What of it?"

Mr. Dimick's grayness and lassitude fell away. His voice was
sharp:

"I think your local Corpos are on to me. Got to hustle. I'm
from Walt Trowbridge. You probably guessed--I've been watching
you all week, asking about you. You've got to be Trowbridge's and
our representative here. Secret war against the Corpos. The
'N.U.,' the 'New Underground,' we call it--like secret
Underground that got the slaves into Canada before the Civil War.
Four divisions: printing propaganda, distributing it, collecting
and exchanging information about Corpo outrages, smuggling
suspects into Canada or Mexico. Of course you don't know one
thing about me. I may be a Corpo spy. But look over these
credentials and telephone your friend Mr. Samson of the
Burlington Paper Company. God's sake be careful! Wire may be
tapped. Ask him about me on the grounds you're interested in
insurance. He's one of us. You're going to be one of us! Now
phone!"

Doremus telephoned to Samson: "Say, Ed, is a fellow named
Dimick, kind of weedy-looking, pop-eyed fellow, all right? Shall
I take his advice on insurance?"

"Yes. Works for Walbridge. Sure. You can ride along with
him."

"I'm riding!"

26

The Informer composing room closed down at eleven in
the evening, for the paper had to be distributed to villages
forty miles away and did not issue a later city edition. Dan
Wilgus, the foreman, remained after the others had gone, setting
a Minute Man poster which announced that there would be a grand
parade on March ninth, and incidentally that President Windrip
was defying the world.

Dan stopped, looked sharply about, and tramped into the
storeroom. In the light from a dusty electric bulb the place was
like a tomb of dead news, with ancient red-and-black posters of
Scotland county fairs and proofs of indecent limericks pasted on
the walls. From a case of eight-point, once used for the setting
of pamphlets but superseded by a monotype machine, Dan picked out
bits of type from each of several compartments, wrapped them in
scraps of print paper, and stored them in the pocket of his
jacket. The raped type boxes looked only half filled, and to make
up for it he did something that should have shocked any decent
printer even if he were on strike. He filled them up with type
not from another eight-point case, but with old ten-point.

Daniel, the large and hairy, thriftily pinching the tiny
types, was absurd as an elephant playing at being a hen.

He turned out the lights on the third floor and clumped
downstairs. He glanced in at the editorial rooms. No one was
there save Doc Itchitt, in a small circle of light that through
the visor of his eye shade cast a green tint on his unwholesome
face. He was correcting an article by the titular editor, Ensign
Emil Staubmeyer, and he snickered as he carved it with a large
black pencil. He raised his head, startled.

"Hello, Doc."

"Hello, Dan. Staying late?"

"Yuh. Just finished some job work. G'night."

"Say, Dan, do you ever see old Jessup, these days?"

"Don't know when I've seen him, Doc. Oh yes, I ran into him at
the Rexall store, couple days ago."

"Still as sour as ever about the régime?"

"Oh, he didn't say anything. Darned old fool! Even if he don't
like all the brave boys in uniform, he ought to see the Chief is
here for keeps, by golly!"

"Certainly ought to! And it's a swell régime. Fellow
can get ahead in newspaper work now, and not be held back by a
bunch of snobs that think they're so doggone educated just
because they went to college!"

"That's right. Well, hell with Jessup and all the old stiffs.
G'night, Doc!"

Dan and Brother Itchitt unsmilingly gave the M.M. salute, arms
held out. Dan thumped down to the street and homeward. He stopped
in front of Billy's Bar, in the middle of a block, and put his
foot up on the hub of a dirty old Ford, to tie his shoelace. As
he tied it--after having untied it--he looked up and down the
street, emptied the bundles in his pockets into a battered sap
bucket on the front seat of the car, and majestically moved
on.

Out of the bar came Pete Vutong, a French-Canadian farmer who
lived up on Mount Terror. Pete was obviously drunk. He was
singing the pre-historic ditty "Hi lee, hi low" in what he
conceived to be German, viz.: "By unz gays immer, yuh longer yuh
slimmer." He was staggering so that he had to pull himself into
the car, and he steered in fancy patterns till he had turned the
corner. Then he was amazingly and suddenly sober; and amazing was
the speed with which the Ford clattered out of town.

Pete Vutong wasn't a very good Secret Agent. He was a little
obvious. But then, Pete had been a spy for only one week.

In that week Dan Wilgus had four times dropped heavy packages
into a sap bucket in the Ford.

Pete passed the gate to Buck Titus's domain, slowed down,
dropped the sap bucket into a ditch, and sped home.

Just at dawn, Buck Titus, out for a walk with his three Irish
wolfhounds, kicked up the sap bucket and transferred the bundles
to his own pocket.

And next afternoon Dan Wilgus, in the basement of Buck's
house, was setting up, in eight-point, a pamphlet entitled "How
Many People Have the Corpos Murdered?" It was signed "Spartan,"
and Spartan was one of several pen names of Mr. Doremus
Jessup.

They were all--all the ringleaders of the local chapter of the
New Underground--rather glad when once, on his way to Buck's, Dan
was searched by M.M.'s unfamiliar to him, and on him was found no
printing-material, nor any documents more incriminating than
cigarette papers.

The Corpos had made a regulation licensing all dealers in
printing machinery and paper and compelling them to keep lists of
purchasers, so that except by bootlegging it was impossible to
get supplies for the issuance of treasonable literature. Dan
Wilgus stole the type; Dan and Doremus and Julian and Buck
together had stolen an entire old hand printing-press from the
Informer basement; and the paper was smuggled from Canada
by that veteran bootlegger, John Pollikop, who rejoiced at being
back in the good old occupation of which repeal had robbed
him.

It is doubtful whether Dan Wilgus would ever have joined
anything so divorced as this from the time clock and the office
cuspidors out of abstract indignation at Windrip or County
Commissioner Ledue. He was moved to sedition partly by fondness
for Doremus and partly by indignation at Doc Itchitt, who
publicly rejoiced because all the printers' unions had been sunk
in the governmental confederations. Or perhaps because Doc jeered
at him personally on the few occasions--not more than once or
twice a week--when there was tobacco juice on his shirt
front.

Dan grunted to Doremus, "All right, boss, I guess maybe I'll
come in with you. And say, when we get this man's revolution
going, let me drive the tumbril with Doc in it. Say, remember
Tale of Two Cities? Good book. Say, how about getting out
a humorous life of Windrip? You'd just have to tell the
facts!"

Buck Titus, pleased as a boy invited to go camping, offered
his secluded house and, in especial, its huge basement for the
headquarters of the New Underground, and Buck, Dan, and Doremus
made their most poisonous plots with the assistance of hot rum
punches at Buck's fireplace.

The Fort Beulah cell of the N.U., as it was composed in
mid-March, a couple of weeks after Doremus had founded it,
consisted of himself, his daughters, Buck, Dan, Lorinda, Julian
Falck, Dr. Olmsted, John Pollikop, Father Perefixe (and he argued
with the agnostic Dan, the atheist Pollikop, more than ever he
had with Buck), Mrs. Henry Veeder, whose farmer husband was in
Trianon Concentration Camp, Harry Kindermann, the dispossessed
Jew, Mungo Kitterick, that most un-Jewish and un-Socialistic
lawyer, Pete Vutong and Daniel Babcock, farmers, and some dozen
others. The Reverend Mr. Falck, Emma Jessup, and Mrs. Candy, were
more or less unconscious tools of the N.U. But whoever they were,
of whatever faith or station, Doremus found in all of them the
religious passion he had missed in the churches; and if altars,
if windows of many-colored glass, had never been peculiarly holy
objects to him, he understood them now as he gloated over such
sacred trash as scarred type and a creaking hand press.

Once it was Mr. Dimick of Albany again; once, another
insurance agent--who guffawed at the accidental luck of insuring
Shad Ledue's new Lincoln; once it was an Armenian peddling rugs;
once, Mr. Samson of Burlington, looking for pine-slashing for
paper pulp; but whoever it was, Doremus heard from the New
Underground every week. He was busy as he had never been in
newspaper days, and happy as on youth's adventure in Boston.

Humming and most cheerful, he ran the small press, with the
hearty bump-bump-bump of the foot treadle, admiring his own skill
as he fed in the sheets. Lorinda learned from Dan Wilgus to set
type, with more fervor than accuracy about ei and
ie. Emma and Sissy and Mary folded news sheets and sewed
up pamphlets by hand, all of them working in the high old
brick-walled basement that smelled of sawdust and lime and
decaying apples.

Aside from pamphlets by Spartan, and by Anthony B. Susan--who
was Lorinda, except on Fridays--their chief illicit publication
was Vermont Vigilance, a four-page weekly which usually
had only two pages and, such was Doremus's unfettered liveliness,
came out about three times a week. It was filled with reports
smuggled to them from other N.U. cells, and with reprints from
Walt Trowbridge's Lance for Democracy and from Canadian,
British, Swedish, and French papers, whose correspondents in
America got out, by long-distance telephone, news which Secretary
of Education Macgoblin, head of the government press department,
spent a good part of his time denying. An English correspondent
sent news of the murder of the president of the University of
Southern Illinois, a man of seventy-two who was shot in the back
"while trying to escape," out of the country by long-distance
telephone to Mexico City, from which the story was relayed to
London.

Doremus discovered that neither he nor any other small citizen
had been hearing one hundredth of what was going on in America.
Windrip & Co. had, like Hitler and Mussolini, discovered that
a modern state can, by the triple process of controlling every
item in the press, breaking up at the start any association which
might become dangerous, and keeping all the machine guns,
artillery, armored automobiles, and aeroplanes in the hands of
the government, dominate the complex contemporary population
better than had ever been done in medieval days, when rebellious
peasantry were armed only with pitchforks and good-will, but the
State was not armed much better.

Dreadful, incredible information came in to Doremus, until he
saw that his own life, and Sissy's and Lorinda's and Buck's, were
unimportant accidents.

In North Dakota, two would-be leaders of the farmers were made
to run in front of an M.M. automobile, through February drifts,
till they dropped breathless, were beaten with a tire pump till
they staggered on, fell again, then were shot in the head, their
blood smearing the prairie snow.

President Windrip, who was apparently becoming considerably
more jumpy than in his old, brazen days, saw two of his personal
bodyguard snickering together in the anteroom of his office and,
shrieking, snatching an automatic pistol from his desk, started
shooting at them. He was a bad marksman. The suspects had to be
finished off by the pistols of their fellow guards.

A crowd of young men, not wearing any sort of uniforms, tore
the clothes from a nun on the station plaza in Kansas City and
chased her, smacking her with bare hands. The police stopped them
after a while. There were no arrests.

In Utah a non-Mormon County Commissioner staked out a Mormon
elder on a bare rock where, since the altitude was high, the
elder at once shivered and felt the glare rather bothersome to
his eyes--since the Commissioner had thoughtfully cut off his
eyelids first. The government press releases made much of the
fact that the torturer was rebuked by the District Commissioner
and removed from his post. It did not mention that he was
reappointed in a county in Florida.

The heads of the reorganized Steel Cartel, a good many of whom
had been officers of steel companies in the days before Windrip,
entertained Secretary of Education Macgoblin and Secretary of War
Luthorne with an aquatic festival in Pittsburgh. The dining room
of a large hotel was turned into a tank of rose-scented water,
and the celebrants floated in a gilded Roman barge. The
waitresses were naked girls, who amusingly swam to the barge
holding up trays and, more often, wine buckets.

Secretary of State Lee Sarason was arrested in the basement of
a handsome boys' club in Washington on unspecified charges by a
policeman who apologized as soon as he recognized Sarason, and
released him, and who that night was shot in his bed by a
mysterious burglar.

Albert Einstein, who had been exiled from Germany for his
guilty devotion to mathematics, world peace, and the violin, was
now exiled from America for the same crimes.

Mrs. Leonard Nimmet, wife of a Congregational pastor in
Lincoln, Nebraska, whose husband had been sent to concentration
camp for a pacifist sermon, was shot through the door and killed
when she refused to open to an M.M. raiding section looking for
seditious literature.

In Rhode Island, the door of a small orthodox synagogue in a
basement was locked from the outside after thin glass containers
of carbon monoxide had been thrown in. The windows had been
nailed shut, and anyway, the nineteen men in the congregation did
not smell the gas until too late. They were all found slumped to
the floor, beards sticking up. They were all over sixty.

Tom Krell--but his was a really nasty case, because he was
actually caught with a copy of Lance for Democracy and
credentials proving that he was a New Underground
messenger--strange thing, too, because everybody had respected
him as a good, decent, unimaginative baggageman at a village
railroad depot in New Hampshire--was dropped down a well with
five feet of water in it, a smooth-sided cement well, and just
left there.

Ex-Supreme Court Justice Hoblin of Montana was yanked out of
bed late at night and examined for sixty hours straight on a
charge that he was in correspondence with Trowbridge. It was said
that the chief examiner was a man whom, years before, Judge
Hoblin had sentenced for robbery with assault.

In one day Doremus received reports that four several literary
or dramatic societies--Finnish, Chinese, Iowan, and one belonging
to a mixed group of miners on the Mesaba Range, Minnesota--had
been broken up, their officers beaten, their clubrooms smashed
up, and their old pianos wrecked, on the charge that they
possessed illegal arms, which, in each case, the members declared
to be antiquated pistols used in theatricals. And in that week
three people were arrested--in Alabama, Oklahoma, and New
Jersey--for the possession of the following subversive books:
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie (and fair
enough too, because the sister-in-law of a county commissioner in
Oklahoma was named Ackroyd); Waiting for Lefty, by
Clifford Odets; and February Hill, by Victoria
Lincoln.

"But plenty things like this happened before Buzz Windrip ever
came in, Doremus," insisted John Pollikop. (Never till they had
met in the delightfully illegal basement had he called Doremus
anything save "Mr. Jessup.") "You never thought about them,
because they was just routine news, to stick in your paper.
Things like the sharecroppers and the Scottsboro boys and the
plots of the California wholesalers against the agricultural
union and dictatorship in Cuba and the way phony deputies in
Kentucky shot striking miners. And believe me, Doremus, the same
reactionary crowd that put over those crimes are just the big
boys that are chummy with Windrip. And what scares me is that if
Walt Trowbridge ever does raise a kinda uprising and kick Buzz
out, the same vultures will get awful patriotic and democratic
and parliamentarian along with Walt, and sit in on the spoils
just the same."

"So Karl Pascal did convert you to Communism before he got
sent to Trianon," jeered Doremus.

John Pollikop jumped four straight feet up in the air, or so
it looked, and came down screaming, "Communism! Never get 'em to
make a United Front! W'y, that fellow Pascal--he was just a
propagandist, and I tell you--I tell you--"

Doremus's hardest job was the translation of items from the
press in Germany, which was most favorable to the Corpos.
Sweating, even in the March coolness in Buck's high basement,
Doremus leaned over a kitchen table, ruffling through a
German-English lexicon, grunting, tapping his teeth with a
pencil, scratching the top of his head, looking like a schoolboy
with a little false gray beard, and wailing to Lorinda, "Now how
in the heck would you translate 'Er erhält noch immer eine
zweideutige Stellung den Juden gegenüber'?" She answered,
"Why, darling, the only German I know is the phrase that Buck
taught me for 'God bless you'--'Verfluchter Schweinehund.'"

He translated word for word, from the Völkischer
Beobachter, and later turned into comprehensible English,
this gratifying tribute to his Chief and Inspirer:

America has a brilliant beginning begun. No one congratulates
President Windrip with greater sincerity than we Germans. The
tendency points as goal to the founding of a Folkish state.
Unfortunately is the President not yet prepared with the liberal
tradition to break. He holds still ever a two-meaning attitude
the Jews visavis. We can but presume that logically this attitude
change must as the movement forced is the complete consequences
of its philosophy to draw. Ahasaver the Wandering Jew will always
the enemy of a free self-conscious people be, and America will
also learn that one even so much with Jewry compromise can as
with the Bubonic plague.

From the New Masses, still published surreptitiously by
the Communists, at the risk of their lives, Doremus got many
items about miners and factory workers who were near starvation
and who were imprisoned if they so much as criticized a straw
boss. . . . But most of the New Masses, with a pious
smugness unshaken by anything that had happened since 1935, was
given over to the latest news about Marx, and to vilifying all
agents of the New Underground, including those who had been
clubbed and jailed and killed, as "reactionary stool pigeons for
Fascism," and it was all nicely decorated with a Gropper cartoon
showing Walt Trowbridge, in M.M. uniform, kissing the foot of
Windrip.

The news bulletins came to Doremus in a dozen insane
ways--carried by messengers on the thinnest of flimsy tissue
paper; mailed to Mrs. Henry Veeder and to Daniel Babcock between
the pages of catalogues, by an N.O. operative who was a clerk in
the mail-order house of Middlebury & Roe; shipped in cartons
of toothpaste and cigarettes to Earl Tyson's drugstore--one clerk
there was an N.U. agent; dropped near Buck's mansion by a
tough-looking and therefore innocent-looking driver of an
interstate furniture-moving truck. Come by so precariously, the
news had none of the obviousness of his days in the office when,
in one batch of A.P. flimsies, were tidings of so many millions
dead of starvation in China, so many statesmen assassinated in
central Europe, so many new churches built by kind-hearted Mr.
Andrew Mellon, that it was all routine. Now, he was like an
eighteenth-century missionary in northern Canada, waiting for the
news that would take all spring to travel from Bristol and down
Hudson Bay, wondering every instant whether France had declared
war, whether Her Majesty had safely given birth.

Doremus realized that he was hearing, all at once, of the
battle of Waterloo, the Diaspora, the invention of the telegraph,
the discovery of bacilli, and the Crusades, and if it took him
ten days to get the news, it would take historians ten decades to
appraise it. Would they not envy him, and consider that he had
lived in the very crisis of history? Or would they just smile at
the flag-waving children of the 1930's playing at being national
heroes? For he believed that these historians would be neither
Communists nor Fascists nor bellicose American or English
Nationalists but just the sort of smiling Liberals that the
warring fanatics of today most cursed as weak waverers.

In all this secret tumult Doremus's most arduous task was to
avoid suspicions that might land him in concentration camp, and
to give appearance of being just the harmless old loafer he
veritably had been, three weeks ago. Befogged with sleep because
he had worked all night at headquarters, he yawned all afternoon
in the lobby of the Hotel Wessex and discussed fishing--the
picture of a man too discouraged to be a menace.

He dropped now and then, on evenings when there was nothing to
do at Buck's and he could loaf in his study at home and
shamefully let himself be quiet and civilized, into renewed
longing for the Ivory Tower. Often, not because it was a great
poem but because it was the first that, when he had been a boy,
had definitely startled him by evoking beauty, he reread
Tennyson's "Arabian Nights":

A realm of pleasance, many a moundAnd many a shadow-chequered lawnFull of the city's stilly sound,And deep myrrh-thickets blowing roundAnd stately cedar, tamarisks,Thick rosaries of scented thorn,Tall orient shrubs, and obelisks Graven with emblems of the time, In honor of the golden prime Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Awhile then he could wander with Romeo and Jurgen, with
Ivanhoe and Lord Peter Wimsey; the Piazza San Marco he saw, and
immemorial towers of Bagdad that never were; with Don John of
Austria he was going forth to war, and he took the golden road to
Samarcand without a visa.

"But Dan Wilgus setting type on proclamations of rebellion,
and Buck Titus distributing them at night on a motorcycle, may be
as romantic as Xanadu . . . living in a blooming epic, right now,
but no Homer come up from the city room yet to write it
down!"

Whit Bibby was an ancient and wordless fishmonger, and as
ancient appeared his horse, though it was by no means silent, but
given to a variety of embarrassing noises. For twenty years his
familiar wagon, like the smallest of cabooses, had conveyed
mackerel and cod and lake trout and tinned oysters to all the
farmsteads in the Beulah Valley. To have suspected Whit Bibby of
seditious practices would have been as absurd as to have
suspected the horse. Older men remembered that he had once been
proud of his father, a captain in the Civil War--and afterward a
very drunken failure at farming--but the young fry had forgotten
that there ever had been a Civil War.

Unconcealed in the sunshine of the late-March afternoon that
touched the worn and ashen snow, Whit jogged up to the farmhouse
of Truman Webb. He had left ten orders of fish, just fish, at
farms along the way, but at Webb's he also left, not speaking of
it, a bundle of pamphlets wrapped in very fishy newspaper.

By next morning these pamphlets had all been left in the post
boxes of farmers beyond Keezmet, a dozen miles away.

Late the next night, Julian Falck drove Dr. Olmsted to the
same Truman Webb's. Now Mr. Webb had an ailing aunt. Up to a
fortnight ago she had not needed the doctor often, but as all the
countryside could, and decidedly did, learn from listening in on
the rural party telephone line, the doctor had to come every
three or four days now.

Julian rapidly slid out, opened the rumble seat of the
doctor's car, and there was the astonishing appearance from the
rumble of a tall man in urban morning coat and striped trousers,
a broad felt hat under his arm, rising, rubbing himself, groaning
with the pain of stretching his cramped body. The doctor
said:

"Truman, we've got a pretty important Eliza, with the
bloodhounds right after him, tonight! Congressman Ingram--Comrade
Webb."

"Huh! Never thought I'd live to be called one of these
'Comrades.' But mighty pleased to see you, Congressman. We'll put
you across the border in Canada in two days--we've got some paths
right through the woods along the border--and there's some good
hot beans waiting for you right now."

The attic in which Mr. Ingram slept that night, an attic
approached by a ladder concealed behind a pile of trunks, was the
"underground station" which, in the 1850's, when Truman's
grandfather was agent, had sheltered seventy-two various black
slaves escaping to Canada, and on the wall above Ingram's weary
threatened head was still to be seen, written in charcoal long
ago, "Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine
enemies."

It was a little after six in the evening, near Tasbrough &
Scarlett's quarries. John Pollikop, with his wrecker car, was
towing Buck Titus, in his automobile. They stopped now and then,
and John looked at the motor in Buck's car very ostentatiously,
in the sight of M.M. patrols, who ignored so obvious a
companionship. They stopped once at the edge of Tasbrough's
deepest pit. Buck strolled about, yawning, while John did some
more tinkering. "Right!" snapped Buck. Both of them leaped at the
over-large toolbox in the back of John's car, lifted out each an
armful of copies of Vermont Vigilance and hurled them over
the edge of the quarry. They scattered in the wind.

Many of them were gathered up and destroyed by Tasbrough's
foremen, next morning, but at least a hundred, in the pockets of
quarrymen, were started on their journey through the world of
Fort Beulah workmen.

Sissy came into the Jessup dining room wearily rubbing her
forehead. "I've got the story, Dad. Sister Candy helped me. Now
we'll have something good to send on to other agents. Listen!
I've been quite chummy with Shad. No! Don't blow up! I know just
how to yank his gun out of his holster if I should ever need to.
And he got to boasting, and he told me Frank Tasbrough and Shad
and Commissioner Reek were all in together on the racket, selling
granite for public buildings, and he told me--you see, he was
sort of boasting about how chummy he and Mr. Tasbrough have
become--how Mr. Tasbrough keeps all the figures on the graft in a
little red notebook in his desk--of course old Franky would never
expect anybody to search the house of as loyal a Corpo as him!
Well, you know Mrs. Candy's cousin is working for the Tasbroughs
for a while, and damn if--"

("Sis-sy!")

"--these two old gals didn't pinch the lil red notebook this
afternoon, and I photographed every page and had 'em stick it
back! And the only comment our Candy makes is, 'That stove t' the
Tasbroughs' don't draw well. Couldn't bake a decent cake in a
stove like that!'"

27

Mary Greenhill, revenging the murdered Fowler, was the only
one of the conspirators who seemed moved more by homicidal hate
than by a certain incredulous feeling that it was all a good but
slightly absurd game. But to her, hate and the determination to
kill were tonic. She soared up from the shadowed pit of grief,
and her eyes lighted, her voice had a trembling gayety. She threw
away her weeds and came out in defiant colors--oh, they had to
economize, these days, to put every available penny into the
missionary fund of the New Underground, but Mary had become so
fire-drawn that she could wear Sissy's giddiest old frocks.

She had more daring than Julian, or even Buck--indeed led Buck
into his riskiest expeditions.

In mid-afternoon, Buck and Mary, looking very matrimonial,
domestically accompanied by David and the rather doubtful
Foolish, ambled through the center of Burlington, where none of
them were known--though a number of dogs, city slickers and
probably con-dogs, insisted to the rustic and embarrassed Foolish
that they had met him somewhere.

It was Buck who muttered "Right!" from time to time, when they
were free from being observed, but it was Mary who calmly, a yard
or two from M.M.'s or policemen, distributed crumpled-up copies
of:

These crumpled pamphlets she took from a specially made inside
pocket of her mink coat; one reaching from shoulder to waist. It
had been recommended by John Pollikop, whose helpful lady had
aforetime used just such a pocket for illicit booze. The
crumpling had been done carefully. Seen from two yards away, the
pamphlets looked like any waste paper, but each was
systematically so wadded up that the words, printed in bold red
type, "Haik himself kicked an old man to death" caught the eye.
And, lying in corner trash baskets, in innocent toy wagons before
hardware stores, among oranges in a fruit store where they had
gone to buy David a bar of chocolate, they caught some hundreds
of eyes in Burlington that day.

On their way home, with David sitting in front beside Buck and
Mary in the back, she cried, "That will stir 'em up! But oh, when
Daddy has finished his booklet on Swan--God!"

David peeped back at her. She sat with eyes closed, with hands
clenched.

He whispered to Buck, "I wish Mother wouldn't get so
excited."

"She's the finest woman living, Dave."

"I know it, but--She scares me so!"

One scheme Mary devised and carried out by herself. From the
magazine counter in Tyson's drugstore, she stole a dozen copies
of the Readers' Digest and a dozen larger magazines. When
she returned them, they looked untouched, but each of the larger
magazines contained a leaflet, "Get Ready to Join Walt
Trowbridge," and each Digest had become the cover for a
pamphlet: "Lies of the Corpo Press."

To serve as center of their plot, to be able to answer the
telephone and receive fugitives and put off suspicious snoopers
twenty-four hours a day, when Buck and the rest might be gone,
Lorinda chucked her small remaining interest in the Beulah Valley
Tavern and became Buck's housekeeper, living in the place. There
was scandal. But in a day when it was increasingly hard to get
enough bread and meat, the town folk had little time to suck
scandal like lollipops, and anyway, who could much suspect this
nagging uplifter who so obviously preferred tuberculin tests to
toying with Corydon in the glade? And as Doremus was always
about, as sometimes he stayed overnight, for the first time these
timid lovers had space for passion.

It had never been their loyalty to the good Emma--since she
was too contented to be pitied, too sure of her necessary
position in life to be jealous--so much as hatred of a shabby
hole-and-corner intrigue which had made their love cautious and
grudging. Neither of them was so simple as to suppose that, even
with quite decent people, love is always as monogamic as bread
and butter, yet neither of them liked sneaking.

Her room at Buck's, large and square and light, with old
landscape paper showing an endlessness of little mandarins
daintily stepping out of sedan chairs beside pools laced with
willows, with a four-poster, a colonial highboy, and a
crazy-colored rag carpet, became in two days, so fast did one
live now in time of revolution, the best-loved home Doremus had
ever known. As eagerly as a young bridegroom he popped into and
out of her room, and he was not overly particular about the state
of her toilet. And Buck knew all about it and just laughed.

Released now, Doremus saw her as physically more alluring.
With parochial superiority, he had noted, during vacations on
Cape Cod, how often the fluffy women of fashion when they
stripped to bathing suits were skinny, to him unwomanly, with
thin shoulder blades and with backbones as apparent as though
they were chains fastened down their backs. They seemed
passionate to him and a little devilish, with their thin restless
legs and avid lips, but he chuckled as he considered that the
Lorinda whose prim gray suits and blouses seemed so much more
virginal than the gay, flaunting summer cottons of the Bright
Young Things was softer of skin to the touch, much richer in the
curve from shoulder to breast.

He rejoiced to know that she was always there in the house,
that he could interrupt the high seriousness of a tract on bond
issues to dash out to the kitchen and brazenly let his arm slide
round her waist.

She, the theoretically independent feminist, became
flatteringly demanding about every attention. Why hadn't he
brought her some candy from town? Would he mind awfully calling
up Julian for her? Why hadn't he remembered to bring her the book
he had promised--well, would have promised if she had only
remembered to ask him for it? He trotted on her errands,
idiotically happy. Long ago Emma had reached the limit of her
imagination in regard to demands. He was discovering that in love
it is really more blessed to give than to receive, a proverb
about which, as an employer and as a steady fellow whom forgotten
classmates regularly tried to touch for loans, he had been very
suspicious.

He lay beside her, in the wide four-poster, at dawn, March
dawn with the elm branches outside the window ugly and writhing
in the wind, but with the last coals still snapping in the
fireplace, and he was utterly content. He glanced at Lorinda, who
had on her sleeping face a frown that made her look not older but
schoolgirlish, a schoolgirl who was frowning comically over some
small woe, and who defiantly clutched her old-fashioned
lace-bordered pillow. He laughed. They were going to be so
adventurous together! This little printing of pamphlets was only
the beginning of their revolutionary activities. They would
penetrate into press circles in Washington and get secret
information (he was drowsily vague about what information they
were going to get and how they would ever get it) which would
explode the Corpo state. And with the revolution over, they would
go to Bermuda, to Martinique--lovers on purple peaks, by a purple
sea--everything purple and grand. Or (and he sighed and became
heroic as he exquisitely stretched and yawned in the wide warm
bed) if they were defeated, if they were arrested and condemned
by the M.M.'s, they would die together, sneering at the
firing-squad, refusing to have their eyes bandaged, and their
fame, like that of Servetus and Matteotti and Professor Ferrer
and the Haymarket martyrs, would roll on forever, acclaimed by
children waving little flags--

"Gimme a cigarette, darling!"

Lorinda was regarding him with a beady and skeptical eye.

"You oughtn't to smoke so much!"

"You oughtn't to boss so much! Oh, my darling!" She sat up,
kissed his eyes and temples, and sturdily climbed out of bed,
seeking her own cigarette.

"Doremus! It's been marvelous to have this companionship with
you. But--" She looked a little timid, sitting cross-legged on
the rattan-topped stool before the old mahogany dressing
table--no silver or lace or crystal was there, but only plain
wooden hairbrush and scant luxury of small drugstore bottles.
"But darling, this cause--oh, curse that word 'cause'--can't I
ever get free of it?--but anyway, this New Underground business
seems to me so important, and I know you feel that way too, but
I've noticed that since we've settled down together, two awful
sentimentalists, you aren't so excited about writing your nice
venomous attacks, and I'm getting more cautious about going out
distributing tracts. I have a foolish idea I have to save my
life, for your sake. And I ought to be only thinking about saving
my life for the revolution. Don't you feel that way? Don't you?
Don't you?"

Doremus swung his legs out of bed, also lighted an unhygienic
cigarette, and said grumpily, "Oh, I suppose so! But--tracts!
Your attitude is simply a hold-over of your religious training.
That you have a duty toward the dull human race--which
probably enjoys being bullied by Windrip and getting bread and
circuses--except for the bread!"

"Of course it's religious, a revolutionary loyalty! Why not?
It's one of the few real religious feelings. A rational,
unsentimental Stalin is still kind of a priest. No wonder most
preachers hate the Reds and preach against 'em! They're jealous
of their religious power. But--Oh, we can't unfold the world,
this morning, even over breakfast coffee, Doremus! When Mr.
Dimick came back here yesterday, he ordered me to Beecher
Falls--you know, on the Canadian border--to take charge of the
N.U. cell there--ostensibly to open up a tea room for this
summer. So, hang it, I've got to leave you, and leave Buck and
Sis, and go. Hang it!"

"Linda!"

She would not look at him. She made much, too much, of
grinding out her cigarette.

"Linda!"

"Yes?"

"You suggested this to Dimick! He never gave any orders till
you suggested it!"

"Well--"

"Linda! Linda! Do you want to get away from me so much?
You--my life!"

She came slowly to the bed, slowly sat down beside him. "Yes.
Get away from you and get away from myself. The world's in
chains, and I can't be free to love till I help tear them
off."

"It will never be out of chains!"

"Then I shall never be free to love! Oh, if we could only have
run away together for one sweet year, when I was eighteen! Then I
would have lived two whole lives. Well, nobody seems to be very
lucky at turning the clock back--almost twenty-five years back,
too. I'm afraid Now is a fact you can't dodge. And I've been
getting so--just this last two weeks, with April coming in--that
I can't think of anything but you. Kiss me. I'm going.
Today."

28

As usually happens in secret service, no one detail that Sissy
ferreted out of Shad Ledue was drastically important to the N.U.,
but, like necessary bits of a picture puzzle, when added to other
details picked up by Doremus and Buck and Mary and Father
Perefixe, that trained extractor of confessions, they showed up
the rather simple schemes of this gang of Corpo racketeers who
were so touchingly accepted by the People as patriotic
shepherds.

Sissy lounged with Julian on the porch, on a deceptively mild
April day.

"Golly, like to take you off camping, couple months from now,
Sis. Just the two of us. Canoe and sleep in a pup tent. Oh, Sis,
do you have to have supper with Ledue and Staubmeyer
tonight? I hate it. God, how I hate it! I warn you, I'll kill
Shad! I mean it!"

"Yes, I do have to, dear. I think I've got Shad crazy enough
about me so that tonight, when he chases good old Emil, and
whatever foul female Emil may bring, out of the place, I'll get
him to tell me something about who they're planning to pinch
next. I'm not scared of Shad, my Julian of jewelians."

He did not smile. He said, with a gravity that had been
unknown to the lively college youth, "Do you realize, with your
kidding yourself about being able to handle Comrade Shad so well,
that he's husky as a gorilla and just about as primitive? One of
these nights--God! think of it! maybe tonight!--he'll go right
off the deep end and grab you and--bing!"

She was as grave. "Julian, just what do you think could happen
to me? The worst that could happen would be that I'd get
raped."

"Good Lord--"

"Do you honestly suppose that since the New Civilization
began, say in 1914, anyone believes that kind of thing is more
serious than busting an ankle? 'A fate worse than death'! What
nasty old side-whiskered deacon ever invented that phrase? And
how he must have rolled it on his chapped old lips! I can think
of plenty worse fates--say, years of running an elevator.
No--wait! I'm not really flippant. I haven't any desire, beyond
maybe a slight curiosity, to be raped--at least, not by Shad;
he's a little too strong on the Bodily Odor when he gets excited.
(Oh God, darling, what a nasty swine that man is! I hate him
fifty times as much as you do. Ugh!) But I'd be willing to have
even that happen if I could save one decent person from his
bloody blackjack. I'm not the playgirl of Pleasant Hill any more;
I'm a frightened woman from Mount Terror!"

It seemed, the whole thing, rather unreal to Sissy; a
burlesqued version of the old melodramas in which the City
Villain tries to ruin Our Nell, apropos of a bottle of Champagne
Wine. Shad, even in a belted tweed jacket, a kaleidoscopic Scotch
sweater (from Minnesota), and white linen plus-fours, hadn't the
absent-minded seductiveness that becomes a City Slicker.

Ensign Emil Staubmeyer had showed up at Shad's new private
suite at the Star Hotel with a grass widow who betrayed her gold
teeth and who had tried to repair the erosions in the fair field
of her neck with overmuch topsoil of brick-tinted powder. She was
pretty dreadful. She was harder to tolerate than the rumbling
Shad--a man for whom the chaplain might even have been a little
sorry, after he was safely hanged. The synthetic widow was always
nudging herself at Emil and when, rather wearily, he obliged by
poking her shoulder, she giggled, "Now you sssstop!"

Shad's suite was clean, and had some air. Beyond that there
was nothing much to say. The "parlor" was firmly furnished in oak
chairs and settee with leather upholstery, and four pictures of
marquises not doing anything interesting. The freshness of the
linen spread on the brass bedstead in the other room fascinated
Sissy uncomfortably.

Shad served them rye highballs with ginger ale from a quart
bottle that had first been opened at least a day ago, sandwiches
with chicken and ham that tasted of niter, and ice cream with six
colors but only two flavors--both strawberry. Then he waited, not
too patiently, looking as much like General Göring as
possible, for Emil and his woman to get the devil out of here,
and for Sissy to acknowledge his virile charms. He only grunted
at Emil's pedagogic little jokes, and the man of culture abruptly
got up and removed his lady, whinnying in farewell, "Now,
Captain, don't you and your girl-friend do anything Papa wouldn't
do!"

"Come on now, baby--come over here and give us a kiss," Shad
roared, as he flopped into the corner of the leather settee.

"Now I don't know whether I will or not!" It nauseated
her a good deal, but she made herself as pertly provocative as
she could. She minced to the settee, and sat just far enough from
his hulking side for him to reach over and draw her toward him.
She observed him cynically, recalling her experience with most of
the Boys . . . though not with Julian . . . well, not so much
with Julian. They always, all of them, went through the same
procedure, heavily pretending that there was no system in their
manual proposals; and to a girl of spirit, the chief diversion in
the whole business was watching their smirking pride in their
technique. The only variation, ever, was whether they started in
at the top or the bottom.

Yes. She thought so. Shad, not being so delicately fanciful
as, say, Malcolm Tasbrough, started with an apparently careless
hand on her knee.

She shivered. His sinewy paw was to her like the slime and
writhing of an eel. She moved away with a maidenly alarm which
mocked the rôle of Mata Hari she had felt herself to be
gracing.

"Like me?" he demanded.

"Oh--well--sort of."

"Oh, shucks! You think I'm still just a hired man! Even though
I am a County Commissioner now! and a Battalion-Leader! and
prob'ly pretty soon I'll be a Commander!" He spoke the sacred
names with awe. It was the twentieth time he had made the same
plaint to her in the same words. "And you still think I ain't
good for anything except lugging in kindling!"

"Oh, Shad dear! Why, I always think of you as being just about
my oldest playmate! The way I used to tag after you and ask you
could I run the lawnmower! My! I always remember that!"

"Do you, honest?" He yearned at her like a lumpish farm
dog.

"Of course! And honest, it makes me tired, your acting as if
you were ashamed of having worked for us! Why, don't you know
that, when he was a boy, Daddy used to work as a farm hand, and
split wood and tend lawn for the neighbors and all that, and he
was awful glad to get the money?" She reflected that this
thumping and entirely impromptu lie was beautiful. . . . That it
happened not to be a lie, she did not know.

"That a fact? Well! Honest? Well! So the old man used to
hustle the rake too! Never knew that! You know, he ain't such a
bad old coot--just awful stubborn."

"You do like him, don't you, Shad! Nobody knows
how sweet he is--I mean, in these sort of complicated days, we've
got to protect him against people that might not understand him,
against outsiders, don't you think so, Shad? You will
protect him!"

"Well, I'll do what I can," said the Battalion-Leader with
such fat complacency that Sissy almost slapped him. "That is, as
long as he behaves himself, baby, and don't get mixed up with any
of these Red rebels . . . and as long as you feel like being nice
to a fella!" He pulled her toward him as though he were hauling a
bag of grain out of a wagon.

"Oh! Shad! You frighten me! Oh, you must be gentle! A big,
strong man like you can afford to be gentle. It's only the
sissies that have to get rough. And you're so strong!"

"Well, I guess I can still feed myself! Say, talking about
sissies, what do you see in a light-waisted mollycoddle like
Julian? You don't really like him, do you?"

"Oh, you know how it is," she said, trying without too much
obviousness to ease her head away from his shoulder. "We've
always been playmates, since we were kids."

"Well, you just said I was, too!"

"Yes, that's so."

Now in her effort to give all the famous pleasures of
seduction without taking any of the risk, the amateur
secret-service operative, Sissy, had a slightly confused aim. She
was going to get from Shad information valuable to the N.U.
Rapidly rehearsing it in her imagination, the while she was
supposed to be weakened by the charm of leaning against Shad's
meaty shoulder, she heard herself teasing him into giving her the
name of some citizen whom the M.M.'s were about to arrest,
slickly freeing herself from him, dashing out to find Julian--oh,
hang it, why hadn't she made an engagement with Julian for that
night?--well, he'd either be at home or out driving Dr.
Olmsted--Julian's melodramatically dashing to the home of the
destined victim and starting him for the Canadian border before
dawn. . . . And it might be a good idea for the refugee to tack
on his door a note dated two days ago, saying that he was off on
a trip, so that Shad would never suspect her. . . . All this in a
second of hectic story-telling, neatly illustrated in color by
her fancy, while she pretended that she had to blow her nose and
thus had an excuse to sit straight. Edging another inch or two
away, she purred, "But of course it isn't just physical strength,
Shad. You have so much power politically. My! I imagine you could
send almost anybody in Fort Beulah off to concentration camp, if
you wanted to."

"Well, I could put a few of 'em away, if they got funny!"

"I'll bet you could--and will, too! Who you going to arrest
next, Shad?"

"Huh?"

"Oh come on! Don't be so tightwad with all your secrets!"

"What are you trying to do, baby? Pump me?"

"Why no, of course not, I just--"

"Sure! You'd like to get the poor old fathead going, and find
out everything he knows--and that's plenty, you can bet your
sweet life on that! Nothing doing, baby."

"Shad, I'd just--I'd just love to see an M.M. squad arresting
somebody once. It must be dreadfully exciting!"

"Oh, it's exciting enough, all right, all right! When the poor
chumps try to resist, and you throw their radio out of the
window! Or when the fellow's wife gets fresh and shoots off her
mouth too much, and so you just teach her a little lesson by
letting her look on while you trip him up on the floor and beat
him up--maybe that sounds a little rough, but you see, in the
long run it's the best thing you can do for these beggars,
because it teaches 'em to not get ugly."

"But--you won't think I'm horrid and unwomanly, will you?--but
I would like to see you hauling out one of those people, just
once. Come on, tell a fellow! Who are you going to arrest
next?"

"Naughty, naughty! Mustn't try to kid papa! No, the womanly
thing for you to do is a little love-making! Aw come on, let's
have some fun, baby! You know you're crazy about me!" Now he
really seized her, his hand across her breasts. She struggled,
thoroughly frightened, no longer cynical and sophisticated. She
shrieked, "Oh don't--don't!" She wept, real tears, more from
anger than from modesty. He loosened his grip a little, and she
had the inspiration to sob, "Oh, Shad, if you really want me to
love you, you must give me time! You wouldn't want me to be a
hussy that you could do anything you wanted to with--you, in your
position? Oh, no, Shad, you couldn't do that!"

"Well, maybe," said he, with the smugness of a carp.

She had sprung up, dabbling at her eyes--and through the
doorway, in the bedroom, on a flat-topped desk, she saw a bunch
of two or three Yale keys. Keys to his office, to secret
cupboards and drawers with Corpo plans! Undoubtedly! Her
imagination in one second pictured her making a rubbing of the
keys, getting John Pollikop, that omnifarious mechanic, to file
substitute keys, herself and Julian somehow or other sneaking
into Corpo headquarters at night, perilously creeping past the
guards, rifling Shad's every dread file--

She stammered, "Do you mind if I go in and wash my face? All
teary--so silly! You don't happen to have any face powder in your
bathroom?"

"Say, what d'you think I am? A hick, or a monk, maybe? You bet
your life I've got some face powder--right in the medicine
cabinet--two kinds--how's that for service? Ladies taken care of
by the day or hour!"

It hurt, but she managed something like a giggle before she
went in and shut the bedroom door, and locked it.

She tore across to the keys. She snatched up a pad of yellow
scratch-paper and a pencil, and tried to make a rubbing of a key
as once she had made rubbings of coins, for use in the small
grocery shop of C. JESSUp & J. falck groSHERS.

The pencil blur showed only the general outline of the key;
the tiny notches which were the trick would not come clear. In
panic, she experimented with a sheet of carbon paper, then toilet
paper, dry and wet. She could not get a mold. She pressed the key
into a prop hotel candle in a china stick by Shad's bed. The
candle was too hard. So was the bathroom soap. And Shad was now
trying the knob of the door, remarking "Damn!" then bellowing,
"Whayuh doin' in there? Gone to sleep?"

"Be right out!" She replaced the keys, threw the yellow paper
and the carbon paper out of the window, replaced the candle and
soap, slapped her face with a dry towel, dashed on powder as
though she were working against time at plastering a wall, and
sauntered back into the parlor. Shad looked hopeful. In panic she
saw that now, before he comfortably sat down to it and became
passionate again, was her one time to escape. She snatched up hat
and coat, said wistfully, "Another night, Shad--you must let me
go now, dear!" and fled before he could open his red muzzle.

Round the corner in the hotel corridor she found Julian.

He was standing taut, trying to look like a watchdog, his
right hand in his coat pocket as though it was holding a
revolver.

She hurled herself against his bosom and howled.

"Good God! What did he do to you? I'll go in and kill
him!"

"Oh, I didn't get seduced. It isn't things like that that I'm
bawling about! It's because I'm such a simply terribly awful
spy!"

But one thing came out of it.

Her courage nerved Julian to something he had longed for and
feared: to join the M.M.'s, put on uniform, "work from within,"
and supply Doremus with information.

"I can get Leo Quinn--you know?--Dad's a conductor on the
railroad?--used to play basketball in high school?--I can get him
to drive Dr. Olmsted for me, and generally run errands for the
N.U. He's got grit, and he hates the Corpos. But look,
Sissy--look, Mr. Jessup--in order to get the M.M.'s to trust me,
I've got to pretend to have a fierce bust-up with you and all our
friends. Look! Sissy and I will walk up Elm Street tomorrow
evening, giving an imitation of estranged lovers. How 'bout it,
Sis?"

"Fine!" glowed that incorrigible actress.

She was to be, every evening at eleven, in a birch grove just
up Pleasant Hill from the Jessups', where they had played house
as children. Because the road curved, the rendezvous could be
entered from four or five directions. There he was to hand on to
her his reports of M.M. plans.

But when he first crept into the grove at night and she
nervously turned her pocket torch on him, she shrieked at seeing
him in M.M. uniform, as an inspector. That blue tunic and
slanting forage cap which, in the cinema and history books, had
meant youth and hope, meant only death now. . . . She wondered if
in 1864 it had not meant death more than moonlight and magnolias
to most women. She sprang to him, holding him as if to protect
him against his own uniform, and in the peril and uncertainty now
of their love, Sissy began to grow up.

29

The propaganda throughout the country was not all to the New
Underground; not even most of it; and though the pamphleteers for
the N.U., at home and exiled abroad, included hundreds of the
most capable professional journalists of America, they were
cramped by a certain respect for facts which never enfeebled the
press agents for Corpoism. And the Corpos had a notable staff. It
included college presidents, some of the most renowned among the
radio announcers who aforetime had crooned their affection for
mouth washes and noninsomniac coffee, famous
ex-war-correspondents, ex-governors, former vice-presidents of
the American Federation of Labor, and no less an artist than the
public relations counsel of a princely corporation of
electrical-goods manufacturers.

The newspapers everywhere might no longer be so
wishily-washily liberal as to print the opinions of non-Corpos;
they might give but little news from those old-fashioned and
democratic countries, Great Britain, France, and the Scandinavian
states; might indeed print almost no foreign news, except as
regards the triumphs of Italy in giving Ethiopia good roads,
trains on time, freedom from beggars and from men of honor, and
all the other spiritual benefactions of Roman civilization. But,
on the other hand, never had newspapers shown so many comic
strips--the most popular was a very funny one about a
preposterous New Underground crank, who wore mortuary black with
a high hat decorated with crêpe and who was always being
comically beaten up by M.M.'s. Never had there been, even in the
days when Mr. Hearst was freeing Cuba, so many large red
headlines. Never so many dramatic drawings of murders--the
murderers were always notorious anti-Corpos. Never such a wealth
of literature, worthy its twenty-four-hour immortality, as the
articles proving, and proving by figures, that American wages
were universally higher, commodities universally lower-priced,
war budgets smaller but the army and its equipment much larger,
than ever in history. Never such righteous polemics as the proofs
that all non-Corpos were Communists.

Almost daily, Windrip, Sarason, Dr. Macgoblin, Secretary of
War Luthorne, or Vice-President Perley Beecroft humbly addressed
their Masters, the great General Public, on the radio, and
congratulated them on making a new world by their example of
American solidarity--marching shoulder to shoulder under the
Grand Old Flag, comrades in the blessings of peace and comrades
in the joys of war to come.

Much-heralded movies, subsidized by the government (and could
there be any better proof of the attention paid by Dr. Macgoblin
and the other Nazi leaders to the arts than the fact that movie
actors who before the days of the Chief were receiving only
fifteen hundred gold dollars a week were now getting five
thousand?), showed the M.M.'s driving armored motors at eighty
miles an hour, piloting a fleet of one thousand planes, and being
very tender to a little girl with a kitten.

Everyone, including Doremus Jessup, had said in 1935, "If
there ever is a Fascist dictatorship here, American humor and
pioneer independence are so marked that it will be absolutely
different from anything in Europe."

For almost a year after Windrip came in, this seemed true. The
Chief was photographed playing poker, in shirtsleeves and with a
derby on the back of his head, with a newspaperman, a chauffeur,
and a pair of rugged steel-workers. Dr. Macgoblin in person led
an Elks' brass band and dived in competition with the Atlantic
City bathing-beauties. It was reputably reported that M.M.'s
apologized to political prisoners for having to arrest them, and
that the prisoners joked amiably with the guards . . . at
first.

All that was gone, within a year after the inauguration, and
surprised scientists discovered that whips and handcuffs hurt
just as sorely in the clear American air as in the miasmic fogs
of Prussia.

Doremus, reading the authors he had concealed in the horsehair
sofa--the gallant Communist, Karl Billinger, the gallant
anti-Communist, Tchernavin, and the gallant neutral,
Lorant--began to see something like a biology of dictatorships,
all dictatorships. The universal apprehension, the timorous
denials of faith, the same methods of arrest--sudden pounding on
the door late at night, the squad of police pushing in, the
blows, the search, the obscene oaths at the frightened women, the
third degree by young snipe of officials, the accompanying blows
and then the formal beatings, when the prisoner is forced to
count the strokes until he faints, the leprous beds and the sour
stew, guards jokingly shooting round and round a prisoner who
believes he is being executed, the waiting in solitude to know
what will happen, till men go mad and hang themselves--

Thus had things gone in Germany, exactly thus in Soviet
Russia, in Italy and Hungary and Poland, Spain and Cuba and Japan
and China. Not very different had it been under the blessings of
liberty and fraternity in the French Revolution. All dictators
followed the same routine of torture, as if they had all read the
same manual of sadistic etiquette. And now, in the humorous,
friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, Doremus saw the
homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had had in
central Europe.

America followed, too, the same ingenious finances as Europe.
Windrip had promised to make everybody richer, and had contrived
to make everybody, except for a few hundred bankers and
industrialists and soldiers, much poorer. He needed no higher
mathematicians to produce his financial statements: any ordinary
press agent could do them. To show a 100 per cent economy in
military expenditures, while increasing the establishment 700 per
cent, it had been necessary only to charge up all expenditures
for the Minute Men to non-military departments, so that their
training in the art of bayonet-sticking was debited to the
Department of Education. To show an increase in average wages one
did tricks with "categories of labor" and "required minimum
wages," and forgot to state how many workers ever did become
entitled to the "minimum," and how much was charged as wages, on
the books, for food and shelter for the millions in the labor
camps.

It all made dazzling reading. There had never been more
elegant and romantic fiction.

Even loyal Corpos began to wonder why the armed forces, army
and M.M.'s together, were being so increased. Was a frightened
Windrip getting ready to defend himself against a rising of the
whole nation? Did he plan to attack all of North and South
America and make himself an emperor? Or both? In any case, the
forces were so swollen that even with its despotic power of
taxation, the Corpo government never had enough. They began to
force exports, to practice the "dumping" of wheat, corn, timber,
copper, oil, machinery. They increased production, forced it by
fines and threats, then stripped the farmer of all he had, for
export at depreciated prices. But at home the prices were not
depreciated but increased, so that the more we exported, the less
the industrial worker in America had to eat. And really zealous
County Commissioners took from the farmer (after the patriotic
manner of many Mid-Western counties in 1918) even his seed grain,
so that he could grow no more, and on the very acres where once
he had raised superfluous wheat he now starved for bread. And
while he was starving, the Commissioners continued to try to make
him pay for the Corpo bonds which he had been made to buy on the
instalment plan.

But still, when he did finally starve to death, none of these
things worried him.

There were bread lines now in Fort Beulah, once or twice a
week.

The hardest phenomenon of dictatorship for a Doremus to
understand, even when he saw it daily in his own street, was the
steady diminution of gayety among the people.

America, like England and Scotland, had never really been a
gay nation. Rather it had been heavily and noisily jocular, with
a substratum of worry and insecurity, in the image of its patron
saint, Lincoln of the rollicking stories and the tragic heart.
But at least there had been hearty greetings, man to man; there
had been clamorous jazz for dancing, and the lively, slangy
catcalls of young people, and the nervous blatting of tremendous
traffic.

All that false cheerfulness lessened now, day by day.

The Corpos found nothing more convenient to milk than public
pleasures. After the bread had molded, the circuses were closed.
There were taxes or increased taxes on motorcars, movies,
theaters, dances, and ice-cream sodas. There was a tax on playing
a phonograph or radio in any restaurant. Lee Sarason, himself a
bachelor, conceived of super-taxing bachelors and spinsters, and
contrariwise of taxing all weddings at which more than five
persons were present.

Even the most reckless youngsters went less and less to public
entertainments, because no one not ostentatiously in uniform
cared to be noticed, these days. It was impossible to sit in a
public place without wondering which spies were watching you. So
all the world stayed home--and jumped anxiously at every passing
footstep, every telephone ring, every tap of an ivy sprig on the
window.

The score of people definitely pledged to the New Underground
were the only persons to whom Doremus dared talk about anything
more incriminating than whether it was likely to rain, though he
had been the friendliest gossip in town. Always it had taken ten
minutes longer than was humanly possible for him to walk to the
Informer office, because he stopped on every corner to ask
after someone's sick wife, politics, potato crop, opinions about
Deism, or luck at fishing.

As he read of rebels against the régime who worked in
Rome, in Berlin, he envied them. They had thousands of government
agents, unknown by sight and thus the more dangerous, to watch
them; but also they had thousands of comrades from whom to seek
encouragement, exciting personal tattle, shop talk, and the
assurance that they were not altogether idiotic to risk their
lives for a mistress so ungrateful as Revolution. Those secret
flats in great cities--perhaps some of them really were filled
with the rosy glow they had in fiction. But the Fort Beulahs,
anywhere in the world, were so isolated, the conspirators so
uninspiringly familiar one to another, that only by inexplicable
faith could one go on.

Now that Lorinda was gone, there certainly was nothing very
diverting in sneaking round corners, trying to look like somebody
else, merely to meet Buck and Dan Wilgus and that good woman,
Sissy!

Buck and he and the rest--they were such amateurs. They needed
the guidance of veteran agitators like Mr. Ailey and Mr. Bailey
and Mr. Cailey.

Their feeble pamphlets, their smearily printed newspaper,
seemed futile against the enormous blare of Corpo propaganda. It
seemed worse than futile, it seemed insane, to risk martyrdom in
a world where Fascists persecuted Communists, Communists
persecuted Social-Democrats, Social-Democrats persecuted
everybody who would stand for it; where "Aryans" who looked like
Jews persecuted Jews who looked like Aryans and Jews persecuted
their debtors; where every statesman and clergyman praised Peace
and brightly asserted that the only way to get Peace was to get
ready for War.

What conceivable reason could one have for seeking after
righteousness in a world which so hated righteousness? Why do
anything except eat and read and make love and provide for sleep
that should be secure against disturbance by armed policemen?

He never did find any particularly good reason. He simply went
on.

In June, when the Fort Beulah cell of the New Underground had
been carrying on for some three months, Mr. Francis Tasbrough,
the golden quarryman, called on his neighbor, Doremus.

"How are you, Frank?"

"Fine, Remus. How's the old carping critic?"

"Fine, Frank. Still carping. Fine carping weather, at that.
Have a cigar?"

"Thanks. Got a match? Thanks. Saw Sissy yesterday. She looks
fine."

"Yes, she's fine. I saw Malcolm driving by yesterday. How did
he like it in the Provincial University, at New York?"

"Oh, fine--fine. He says the athletics are grand. They're
getting Primo Carnera over to coach in tennis next year--I think
it's Carnera--I think it's tennis--but anyway, the athletics are
fine there, Malcolm says. Say, uh, Remus, there's something I
been meaning to ask you. I, uh--The fact is--I want you to be
sure and not repeat this to anybody. I know you can be trusted
with a secret, even if you are a newspaperman--or used to be, I
mean, but--The fact is (and this is inside stuff; official),
there's going to be some governmental promotions all along the
line--this is confidential, and it comes to me straight from the
Provincial Commissioner, Colonel Haik. Luthorne is finished as
Secretary of War--he's a nice fellow, but he hasn't got as much
publicity for the Corpos out of his office as the Chief expected
him to. Haik is to have his job, and also take over the position
of High Marshal of the Minute Men from Lee Sarason--I suppose
Sarason has too much to do. Well then, John Sullivan Reek is
slated to be Provincial Commissioner; that leaves the office of
District Commissioner for Vermont-New Hampshire empty, and I'm
one of the people being seriously considered. I've done a lot of
speaking for the Corpos, and I know Dewey Haik very well--I was
able to advise him about erecting public buildings. Of course
there's none of the County Commissioners around here that measure
up to a district commissionership--not even Dr.
Staubmeyer--certainly not Shad Ledue. Now if you could see your
way clear to throw in with me, your influence would help--"

"Good heavens, Frank, the worst thing you could have happen,
if you want the job, is to have me favor you! The Corpos don't
like me. Oh, of course they know I'm loyal, not one of these
dirty, sneaking anti-Corpos, but I never made enough noise in the
paper to please 'em."

"That's just it, Remus! I've got a really striking idea. Even
if they don't like you, the Corpos respect you, and they know how
long you've been important in the State. We'd all be greatly
pleased if you came out and joined us. Now just suppose you did
so and let people know that it was my influence that converted
you to Corpoism. That might give me quite a leg-up. And between
old friends like us, Remus, I can tell you that this job of
District Commissioner would be useful to me in the quarry
business, aside from the social advantages. And if I got the
position, I can promise you that I'd either get the
Informer taken away from Staubmeyer and that dirty little
stinker, Itchitt, and given back to you to run absolutely as you
pleased--providing, of course, you had the sense to keep from
criticizing the Chief and the State. Or, if you'd rather, I think
I could probably wangle a job for you as military judge (they
don't necessarily have to be lawyers) or maybe President
Peaseley's job as District Director of Education--you'd have a
lot of fun out of that!--awfully amusing the way all the teachers
kiss the Director's foot! Come on, old man! Think of all the fun
we used to have in the old days! Come to your senses and face the
inevitable and join us and fix up some good publicity for me. How
about it--huh, huh?"

Doremus reflected that the worst trial of a revolutionary
propagandist was not risking his life, but having to be civil to
people like Future-Commissioner Tasbrough.

He supposed that his voice was polite as he muttered, "Afraid
I'm too old to try it, Frank," but apparently Tasbrough was
offended. He sprang up and tramped away grumbling, "Oh, very well
then!"

"And I didn't give him a chance to say anything about being
realistic or breaking eggs to make an omelet," regretted
Doremus.

The next day Malcolm Tasbrough, meeting Sissy on the street,
made his beefy most of cutting her. At the time the Jessups
thought that was very amusing. They thought the occasion less
amusing when Malcolm chased little David out of the Tasbrough
apple orchard, which he had been wont to use as the Great Western
Forest where at any time one was rather more than likely to meet
Kit Carson, Robin Hood, and Colonel Lindbergh hunting
together.

Having only Frank's word for it, Doremus could do no more than
hint in Vermont Vigilance that Colonel Dewey Haik was to
be made Secretary of War, and give Haik's actual military record,
which included the facts that as a first lieutenant in France in
1918, he had been under fire for less than fifteen minutes, and
that his one real triumph had been commanding state militia
during a strike in Oregon, when eleven strikers had been shot
down, five of them in the back.

Then Doremus forgot Tasbrough completely and happily.

30

But worse than having to be civil to the fatuous Mr. Tasbrough
was keeping his mouth shut when, toward the end of June, a
newspaperman at Battington, Vermont, was suddenly arrested as
editor of Vermont Vigilance and author of all the
pamphlets by Doremus and Lorinda. He went to concentration camp.
Buck and Dan Wilgus and Sissy prevented Doremus from confessing,
and from even going to call on the victim, and when, with Lorinda
no longer there as confidante, Doremus tried to explain it all to
Emma, she said, Wasn't it lucky that the government had blamed
somebody else!

Emma had worked out the theory that the N.U. activity was some
sort of a naughty game which kept her boy, Doremus, busy after
his retirement. He was mildly nagging the Corpos. She wasn't sure
that it was really nice to nag the legal authorities, but still,
for a little fellow, her Doremus had always been surprisingly
spunky--just like (she often confided to Sissy) a spunky little
Scotch terrier she had owned when she was a girl--Mr. McNabbit
its name had been, a little Scotch terrier, but my! so spunky he
acted like he was a regular lion!

She was rather glad that Lorinda was gone, though she liked
Lorinda and worried about how well she might do with a tea room
in a new town, a town where she had never lived. But she just
couldn't help feeling (she confided not only to Sissy but to Mary
and Buck) that Lorinda, with all her wild crazy ideas about
women's rights, and workmen being just as good as their
employers, had a bad influence on Doremus's tendency to show off
and shock people. (She mildly wondered why Buck and Sissy snorted
so. She hadn't meant to say anything particularly funny!)

For too many years she had been used to Doremus's irregular
routine to have her sleep disturbed by his returning from Buck's
at the improper time to which she referred as "at all hours," but
she did wish he would be "more on time for his meals," and she
gave up the question of why, these days, he seemed to like to
associate with Ordinary People like John Pollikop, Dan Wilgus,
Daniel Babcock, and Pete Vutong--my! some people said Pete
couldn't even read and write, and Doremus so educated and all!
Why didn't he see more of lovely people like Frank Tasbrough and
Professor Staubmeyer and Mr. R. C. Crowley and this new friend of
his, the Hon. John Sullivan Reek?

Why couldn't he keep out of politics? She'd always said
they were no occupation for a gentleman!

Like David, now ten years old (and like twenty or thirty
million other Americans, from one to a hundred, but all of the
same mental age), Emma thought the marching M.M.'s were a very
fine show indeed, so much like movies of the Civil War, really
quite educational; and while of course if Doremus didn't care for
President Windrip, she was opposed to him also, yet didn't Mr.
Windrip speak beautifully about pure language, church attendance,
low taxation, and the American flag?

The realists, the makers of omelets, did climb, as Tasbrough
had predicted. Colonel Dewey Haik, Commissioner of the
Northeastern Province, became Secretary of War and High Marshal
of M.M.'s, while the former secretary, Colonel Luthorne, retired
to Kansas and the real-estate business and was well spoken of by
all business men for being thus willing to give up the grandeur
of Washington for duty toward practical affairs and his family,
who were throughout the press depicted as having frequently
missed him. It was rumored in N.U. cells that Haik might go
higher even than Secretary of War; that Windrip was worried by
the forced growth of a certain effeminacy in Lee Sarason under
the arc light of glory.

Francis Tasbrough was elevated to District Commissionership at
Hanover. But Mr. Sullivan Reek did not in series go on to be
Provincial Commissioner. It was said that he had too many friends
among just the old-line politicians whose jobs the Corpos were so
enthusiastically taking. No, the new Provincial Commissioner,
viceroy and general, was Military Judge Effingham Swan, the one
man whom Mary Jessup Greenhill hated more than she did Shad
Ledue.

Swan was a splendid commissioner. Within three days after
taking office, he had John Sullivan Reek and seven assistant
district commissioners arrested, tried, and imprisoned, all
within twenty-four hours, and an eighty-year-old woman, mother of
a New Underground agent but not otherwise accused of wickedness,
penned in a concentration camp for the more desperate traitors.
It was in a disused quarry which was always a foot deep in water.
After he had sentenced her, Swan was said to have bowed to her
most courteously.

The New Underground sent out warning, from headquarters in
Montreal, for a general tightening up of precautions against
being caught distributing propaganda. Agents were disappearing
rather alarmingly.

Buck scoffed, but Doremus was nervous. He noticed that the
same strange man, ostensibly a drummer, a large man with
unpleasant eyes, had twice got into conversation with him in the
Hotel Wessex lobby, and too obviously hinted that he was
anti-Corpo and would love to have Doremus say something nasty
about the Chief and the M.M.'s.

Doremus became cautious about going out to Buck's. He parked
his car in half-a-dozen different wood-roads and crept afoot to
the secret basement.

On the evening of the twenty-eighth of June, 1938, he had a
notion that he was being followed, so closely did a car with
red-tinted headlights, anxiously watched in his rear-view mirror,
stick behind him as he took the Keezmet highway down to Buck's.
He turned up a side road, down another. The spy car followed. He
stopped, in a driveway on the left-hand side of the road, and
angrily stepped out, in time to see the other car pass, with a
man who looked like Shad Ledue driving. He swung round then and,
without concealment, bolted for Buck's.

In the basement, Buck was contentedly tying up bundles of the
Vigilance, while Father Perefixe, in his shirtsleeves,
vest open and black dickey swinging beneath his reversed collar,
sat at a plain pine table, writing a warning to New England
Catholics that though the Corpos had, unlike the Nazis in
Germany, been shrewd enough to flatter prelates, they had lowered
the wages of French-Canadian Catholic mill hands and imprisoned
their leaders just as severely as in the case of the avowedly
wicked Protestants.

Perefixe smiled up at Doremus, stretched, lighted a pipe, and
chuckled, "As a great ecclesiast, Doremus, is it your opinion
that I shall be committing a venial or a mortal sin by publishing
this little masterpiece--the work of my favorite author--without
the Bishop's imprimatur?"

"Stephen! Buck! I think they're on to us! Maybe we've got to
fold up already and get the press and type out of here!" He told
of being shadowed. He telephoned to Julian, at M.M. headquarters,
and (since there were too many French-Canadian inspectors about
for him to dare to use his brand of French) he telephoned in the
fine new German he had been learning by translation:

And the college-bred Julian had so much international culture
as to be able to answer: "Ja, Ich mein ihr vos sachen morning
free. Look owid!"

How could they move? Where?

Dan Wilgus arrived, in panic, an hour after.

"Say! They're watching us!" Doremus, Buck, and the priest
gathered round the black viking of a man. "Just now when I came
in I thought I heard something in the bushes, here in the yard,
near the house, and before I thought, I flashed my torch on him,
and by golly if it wasn't Aras Dilley, and not in uniform--and
you know how Aras loves his God--excuse me, Father--how he loves
his uniform. He was disguised! Sure! In overalls! Looked like a
jackass that's gone under a clothes-line! Well, he'd been
rubbering at the house. Course these curtains are drawn, but I
don't know what he saw and--"

The three large men looked to Doremus for orders.

"We got to get all this stuff out of here! Quick! Take it and
hide it in Truman Webb's attic. Stephen: get John Pollikop and
Mungo Kitterick and Pete Vutong on the phone--get 'em here,
quick--tell John to stop by and tell Julian to come as soon as he
can. Dan: start dismantling the press. Buck: bundle up all the
literature." As he spoke, Doremus was wrapping type in scraps of
newspaper. And at three next morning, before light, Pollikop was
driving toward Truman Webb's farmhouse the entire equipment of
the New Underground printing establishment, in Buck's old farm
truck, from which blatted, for the benefit of all ears that might
be concerned, two frightened calves.

Next day Julian ventured to invite his superior officers, Shad
Ledue and Emil Staubmeyer, to a poker session at Buck's. They
came, with alacrity. They found Buck, Doremus, Mungo Kitterick,
and Doc Itchitt--the last an entirely innocent participant in
certain deceptions.

They played in Buck's parlor. But during the evening Buck
announced that anyone wanting beer instead of whisky would find
it in a tub of ice in the basement, and that anyone wishing to
wash his hands would find two bathrooms upstairs.

Shad hastily went for beer. Doc Itchitt even more hastily went
to wash his hands. Both of them were gone much longer than one
would have expected.

When the party broke up and Buck and Doremus were alone, Buck
shrieked with bucolic mirth: "I could scarcely keep a straight
face when I heard good old Shad opening the cupboards and taking
a fine long look-see for pamphlets down in the basement. Well,
Cap'n Jessup, that about ends their suspicion of this place as a
den of traitors, I guess! God, but isn't Shad dumb!"

This was at perhaps 3 A.M. on the morning of June
thirtieth.

Doremus stayed home, writing sedition, all the afternoon and
evening of the thirtieth, hiding the sheets under pages of
newspaper in the Franklin stove in his study, so that he could
touch them off with a match in case of a raid--a trick he had
learned from Karl Billinger's anti-Nazi Fatherland.

This new opus was devoted to murders ordered by Commissioner
Effingham Swan.

On the first and second of July, when he sauntered uptown, he
was rather noticeably encountered by the same weighty drummer who
had picked him up in the Hotel Wessex lobby before, and who now
insisted on their having a drink together. Doremus escaped, and
was conscious that he was being followed by an unknown young man,
flamboyant in an apricot-colored polo shirt and gray bags, whom
he recognized as having worn M.M. uniform at a parade in June. On
July third, rather panicky, Doremus drove to Truman Webb's,
taking an hour of zigzagging to do it, and warned Truman not to
permit any more printing till he should have a release.

When Doremus went home, Sissy lightly informed him that Shad
had insisted she go out to an M.M. picnic with him on the next
afternoon, the Fourth, and that, information or no, she had
refused. She was afraid of him, surrounded by his ready
playmates.

That night of the third, Doremus slept only in sick spasms. He
was reasonlessly convinced that he would be arrested before dawn.
The night was overcast and electric and uneasy. The crickets
sounded as though they were piping under compulsion, in a rhythm
of terror. He lay throbbing to their sound. He wanted to
flee--but how and where, and how could he leave his threatened
family? For the first time in years he wished that he were
sleeping beside the unperturbable Emma, beside her small earthy
hillock of body. He laughed at himself. What could Emma do to
protect him against Minute Men? Just scream! And what then? But
he, who always slept with his door shut, to protect his sacred
aloneness, popped out of bed to open the door, that he might have
the comfort of hearing her breathe, and the fiercer Mary stir in
slumber, and Sissy's occasional young whimper.

He was awakened before dawn by early firecrackers. He heard
the tramping of feet. He lay taut. Then he awoke again, at
seven-thirty, and was slightly angry that nothing happened.

The M.M.'s brought out their burnished helmets and all the
rideable horses in the neighborhood--some of them known as most
superior plow-horses--for the great celebration of the New
Freedom on the morning of Fourth of July. There was no post of
the American Legion in the jaunty parade. That organization had
been completely suppressed, and a number of American Legion
leaders had been shot. Others had tactfully taken posts in the
M.M. itself.

The troops, in hollow square, with the ordinary citizenry
humbly jammed in behind them and the Jessup family rather
hoity-toity on the outskirts, were addressed by Ex-Governor Isham
Hubbard, a fine ruddy old rooster who could say
"Cock-a-doodle-do" with more profundity than any fowl since
Æsop. He announced that the Chief had extraordinary
resemblances to Washington, Jefferson, and William B. McKinley,
and to Napoleon on his better days.

The trumpets blew, the M.M.'s gallantly marched off nowhere in
particular, and Doremus went home, feeling much better after his
laugh. Following noon dinner, since it was raining, he proposed a
game of contract to Emma, Mary, and Sissy--with Mrs. Candy as
volunteer umpire.

But the thunder of the hill country disquieted him. Whenever
he was dummy, he ambled to a window. The rain ceased; the sun
came out for a false, hesitating moment, and the wet grass looked
unreal. Clouds with torn bottoms, like the hem of a ragged skirt,
were driven down the valley, cutting off the bulk of Mount
Faithful; the sun went out as in a mammoth catastrophe; and
instantly the world was in unholy darkness, which poured into the
room.

The rain attacked again, in a crash, and to Doremus, looking
out, the whole knowable world seemed washed out. Through the
deluge he saw a huge car flash, the great wheels throwing up
fountains. "Wonder what make of car that is? Must be a
sixteen-cylinder Cadillac, I guess," reflected Doremus. The car
swerved into his own gateway, almost knocking down a gatepost,
and stopped with a jar at his porch. From it leaped five Minute
Men, black waterproof capes over their uniforms. Before he could
quite get through the reflection that he recognized none of them,
they were there in the room. The leader, an ensign (and most
certainly Doremus did not recognize him) marched up to
Doremus, looked at him casually, and struck him full in the
face.

Except for the one light pink of the bayonet when he had been
arrested before, except for an occasional toothache or headache,
or a smart when he had banged a fingernail, Doremus Jessup had
not for thirty years known authentic pain. It was as incredible
as it was horrifying, this torture in his eyes and nose and
crushed mouth. He stood bent, gasping, and the Ensign again
smashed his face, and observed, "You are under arrest."

Mary had launched herself on the Ensign, was hitting at him
with a china ash tray. Two M.M.'s dragged her off, threw her on
the couch, and one of them pinned her there. The other two guards
were bulking over the paralyzed Emma, the galvanized Sissy.

Doremus vomited suddenly and collapsed, as though he were dead
drunk.

He was conscious that the five M.M.'s were yanking the books
from the shelves and hurling them on the floor, so that the
covers split, and with their pistol butts smashing vases and lamp
shades and small occasional tables. One of them tattooed a rough
M M on the white paneling above the fireplace with shots from his
automatic.

The Ensign said only, "Careful, Jim," and kissed the
hysterical Sissy.

Doremus struggled to get up. An M.M. kicked him in the elbow.
It felt like death itself, and Doremus writhed on the floor. He
heard them tramping upstairs. He remembered then that his
manuscript about the murders by Provincial Commissioner Effingham
Swan was hidden in the Franklin stove in his study.

The sound of their smashing of furniture in the bedrooms on
the second floor was like that of a dozen wood-choppers gone
mad.

In all his agony, Doremus struggled to get up--to set fire to
the papers in the stove before they should be found. He tried to
look at his women. He could make out Mary, tied to the couch.
(When had that ever happened?) But his vision was too blurred,
his mind too bruised, to see anything clearly. Staggering,
sometimes creeping on his hands and knees, he did actually get
past the men in the bedrooms and up the stairs to the third floor
and his study.

He was in time to see the Ensign throwing his best-beloved
books and his letter files, accumulated these twenty years, out
of the study window, to see him search the papers in the Franklin
stove, look up with cheerful triumph and cackle, "Nice piece
you've written here, I guess, Jessup. Commissioner Swan will love
to see it!"

"Don't know a thing about them. I'm running this show," the
Ensign chuckled, and slapped Doremus, not very painfully, merely
with a shamefulness as great as Doremus's when he realized that
he had been so cowardly as to appeal to Shad and Francis. He did
not open his mouth again, did not whimper nor even amuse the
troopers by vainly appealing on behalf of the women, as he was
hustled down two flights of stairs--they threw him down the lower
flight and he landed on his raw shoulder--and out to the big
car.

The M.M. driver, who had been waiting behind the wheel,
already had the engine running. The car whined away, threatening
every instant to skid. But the Doremus who had been queasy about
skidding did not notice. What could he do about it, anyway? He
was helpless between two troopers in the back seat, and his
powerlessness to make the driver slow up seemed part of all his
powerlessness before the dictator's power . . . he who had always
so taken it for granted that in his dignity and social security
he was just slightly superior to laws and judges and policemen,
to all the risks and pain of ordinary workers.

He was unloaded, like a balky mule, at the jail entrance of
the courthouse. He resolved that when he was led before Shad he
would so rebuke the scoundrel that he would not forget it. But
Doremus was not taken into the courthouse. He was kicked toward a
large, black-painted, unlettered truck by the entrance--literally
kicked, while even in his bewildered anguish he speculated, "I
wonder which is worse?--the physical pain of being kicked, or the
mental humiliation of being turned into a slave? Hell! Don't be
sophistical! It's the pain in the behind that hurts most!"

He was hiked up a stepladder into the back of the truck.

From the unlighted interior a moan, "My God, not you too,
Dormouse!" It was the voice of Buck Titus, and with him as
prisoners were Truman Webb and Dan Wilgus. Dan was in handcuffs,
because he had fought so.

The four men were too sore to talk much as they felt the truck
lurch away and they were thrown against one another. Once Doremus
spoke truthfully, "I don't know how to tell you how ghastly sorry
I am to have got you into this!" and once he lied, when Buck
groaned, "Did those ----- ----- hurt the girls?"

They must have ridden for three hours. Doremus was in such a
coma of suffering that even though his back winced as it bounced
against the rough floor and his face was all one neuralgia, he
drowsed and woke to terror, drowsed and woke, drowsed and woke to
his own helpless wailing.

The truck stopped. The doors were opened on lights thick among
white brick buildings. He hazily saw that they were on the
one-time Dartmouth campus--headquarters now of the Corpo District
Commissioner.

That commissioner was his old acquaintance Francis Tasbrough!
He would be released! They would be freed, all four!

The incredulity of his humiliation cleared away. He came out
of his sick fear like a shipwrecked man sighting an approaching
boat.

But he did not see Tasbrough. The M.M.'s, silent save for
mechanical cursing, drove him into a hallway, into a cell which
had once been part of a sedate classroom, left him with a final
clout on the head. He dropped on a wooden pallet with a straw
pillow and was instantly asleep. He was too dazed--he who usually
looked recordingly at places--to note then or afterward what his
cell was like, except that it appeared to be filled with
sulphuric fumes from a locomotive engine.

When he came to, his face seemed frozen stiff. His coat was
torn, and foul with the smell of vomit. He felt degraded, as
though he had done something shameful.

His door was violently opened, a dirt-clotted bowl of feeble
coffee, with a crust of bread faintly smeared with oleomargarine,
was thrust at him, and after he had given them up, nauseated, he
was marched out into the corridor, by two guards, just as he
wanted to go to the toilet. Even that he could forget in the
paralysis of fear. One guard seized him by the trim small beard
and yanked it, laughing very much. "Always did want to see
whether a billygoat whisker would pull out or not!" snickered the
guard. While he was thus tormented, Doremus received a crack
behind his ear from the other man, and a scolding command, "Come
on, goat! Want us to milk you? You dirty little so-and-so! What
you in for? You look like a little Kike tailor, you little
-----"

"Him?" the other scoffed. "Naw! He's some kind of a half-eared
hick newspaper editor--they'll sure shoot him--sedition--but I
hope they'll beat hell out of him first for being such a bum
editor."

"Him? An editor? Say! Listen! I got a swell idea. Hey!
Fellas!" Four or five other M.M.'s, half dressed, looked out from
a room down the hall. "This-here is a writing-fellow! I'm going
to make him show us how he writes! Lookit!"

The guard dashed down the corridor to a door with the sign
"Gents" hung out in front of it, came back with paper, not clean,
threw it in front of Doremus, and yammered, "Come on, boss. Show
us how you write your pieces! Come on, write us a piece--with
your nose!" He was iron-strong. He pressed Doremus's nose down
against the filthy paper and held it there, while his mates
giggled. They were interrupted by an officer, commanding, though
leniently, "Come on, boys, cut out the monkeyshines and take this
----- to the bull pen. Trial this morning."

Doremus was led to a dirty room in which half-a-dozen
prisoners were waiting. One of them was Buck Titus. Over one eye
Buck had a slatternly bandage which had so loosened as to show
that his forehead was cut to the bone. Buck managed to wink
jovially. Doremus tried, vainly, to keep from sobbing.

He waited an hour, standing, arms tight at his side, at the
demands of an ugly-faced guard, snapping a dog whip with which he
twice slashed Doremus when his hands fell lax.

Buck was led into the trial room just before him. The door was
closed. Doremus heard Buck cry out terribly, as though he had
been wounded to death. The cry faded into a choked gasping. When
Buck was led out of the inner room, his face was as dirty and as
pale as his bandage, over which blood was now creeping. The man
at the door of the inner room jerked his thumb sharply at
Doremus, and snarled, "You're next!"

Now he would face Tasbrough!

But in the small room into which he had been taken--and he was
confused, because somehow he had expected a large
courtroom--there was only the Ensign who had arrested him
yesterday, sitting at a table, running through papers, while a
stolid M.M. stood on either side of him, rigid, hand on pistol
holster.

The Ensign kept him waiting, then snapped with disheartening
suddenness, "Your name!"

"You know it!"

The two guards beside Doremus each hit him.

"Your name?"

"Doremus Jessup."

"You're a Communist!"

"No I'm not!"

"Twenty-five lashes--and the oil."

Not believing, not understanding, Doremus was rushed across
the room, into a cellar beyond. A long wooden table there was
dark with dry blood, stank with dry blood. The guards seized
Doremus, sharply jerked his head back, pried open his jaws, and
poured in a quart of castor oil. They tore off his garments above
the belt, flung them on the sticky floor. They threw him face
downward on the long table and began to lash him with a one-piece
steel fishing rod. Each stroke cut into the flesh of his back,
and they beat him slowly, relishing it, to keep him from fainting
too quickly. But he was unconscious when, to the guards' great
diversion, the castor oil took effect. Indeed he did not know it
till he found himself limp on a messy piece of gunnysacking on
the floor of his cell.

They awakened him twice during the night to demand, "You're a
Communist, heh? You better admit it! We're going to beat the
living tar out of you till you do!"

Though he was sicker than he had ever been in his life, yet he
was also angrier; too angry to admit anything whatever, even to
save his wrecked life. He simply snarled "No." But on the third
beating he savagely wondered if "No" was now a truthful answer.
After each questioning he was pounded again with fists, but not
lashed with the steel rod, because the headquarters doctor had
forbidden it.

He was a sporty-looking young doctor in plus-fours. He yawned
at the guards, in the blood-reeking cellar, "Better cut out the
lashes or this ----- will pass out on you."

Doremus raised his head from the table to gasp, "You call
yourself a doctor, and you associate with these murderers?"

"Oh, shut up, you little -----! Dirty traitors like you
deserve to be beaten to death--and maybe you will be, but I think
the boys ought to save you for the trial!" The doctor showed his
scientific mettle by twisting Doremus's ear till it felt as
though it were torn off, chuckled, "Go to it, boys," and ambled
away, ostentatiously humming.

For three nights he was questioned and lashed--once, late at
night, by guards who complained of the inhuman callousness of
their officers in making them work so late. They amused
themselves by using an old harness strap, with a buckle on it, to
beat him.

He almost broke down when the examining Ensign declared that
Buck Titus had confessed their illegal propaganda, and narrated
so many details of the work that Doremus could almost have
believed in the confession. He did not listen. He told himself,
"No! Buck would die before he'd confess anything. It's all Aras
Dilley's spying."

The Ensign cooed, "Now if you'll just have the sense to copy
your friend Titus and tell us who's in the conspiracy besides him
and you and Wilgus and Webb, we'll let you go. We know, all
right--oh, we know the whole plot!--but we just want to find out
whether you've finally come to your senses and been converted, my
little friend. Now who else was there? Just give us their names.
We'll let you go. Or would you like the castor oil and the whip
again?"

Doremus did not answer.

"Ten lashes," said the Ensign.

He was chased out for half an hour's walk on the campus every
afternoon--probably because he would have preferred lying on his
hard cot, trying to keep still enough so that his heart would
stop its deathly hammering. Half a hundred prisoners marched
there, round and round senselessly. He passed Buck Titus. To
salute him would have meant a blow from the guards. They greeted
each other with quick eyelids, and when he saw those untroubled
spaniel eyes, Doremus knew that Buck had not squealed.

And in the exercise yard he saw Dan Wilgus, but Dan was not
walking free; he was led out from the torture rooms by guards,
and with his crushed nose, his flattened ear, he looked as though
he had been pounded by a prizefighter. He seemed partly
paralyzed. Doremus tried to get information about Dan from a
guard in his cell corridor. The guard--a handsome, clear-cheeked
young man, noted in a valley of the White Mountains as a local
beau, and very kind to his mother--laughed, "Oh, your friend
Wilgus? That chump thinks he can lick his weight in wildcats. I
hear he always tries to soak the guards. They'll take that out of
him, all right!"

Doremus thought, that night--he could not be sure, but he
thought he heard Dan wailing, half the night. Next morning he was
told that Dan, who had always been so disgusted when he had had
to set up the news of a weakling's suicide, had hanged himself in
his cell.

Then, unexpectedly, Doremus was taken into a room, this time
reasonably large, a former English classroom turned into a court,
for his trial.

But it was not District Commissioner Francis Tasbrough who was
on the bench, nor any Military Judge, but no less a Protector of
the People than the great new Provincial Commissioner, Effingham
Swan.

Swan was looking at Doremus's article about him as Doremus was
led up to stand before the bench. He spoke--and this harsh,
tired-looking man was no longer the airy Rhodes Scholar who had
sported with Doremus once like a boy pulling the wings off
flies.

"Jessup, do you plead guilty to seditious activities?"

"Why--" Doremus looked helplessly about for something in the
way of legal counsel.

"Commissioner Tasbrough!" called Swan.

So at last Doremus did see his boyhood playmate.

Tasbrough did nothing so commendable as to avoid Doremus's
eyes. Indeed he looked at Doremus directly, and most affably, as
he spoke his piece:

"Your Excellency, it gives me great pain to have to expose
this man, Jessup, whom I have known all my life, and tried to
help, but he always was a smart-aleck--he was a laughing-stock in
Fort Beulah for the way he tried to show off as a great political
leader!--and when the Chief was elected, he was angry because he
didn't get any political office, and he went about everywhere
trying to disaffect people--I have heard him do so myself."

"That's enough. Thanks. County Commissioner Ledue . . .
Captain Ledue, is it or is it not true that the man Jessup tried
to persuade you to join a violent plot against my person?"

But Shad did not look at Doremus as he mumbled, "It's
true."

Swan crackled, "Gentlemen, I think that that, plus the
evidence contained in the prisoner's own manuscript, which I hold
here, is sufficient testimony. Prisoner, if it weren't for your
age and your damn silly senile weakness, I'd sentence you to a
hundred lashes, as I do all the other Communists like you that
threaten the Corporate State. As it is, I sentence you to be held
in concentration camp, at the will of the Court, but with a
minimum sentence of seventeen years." Doremus calculated rapidly.
He was sixty-two now. He would be seventy-nine then. He
never would see freedom again. "And, in the power of issuing
emergency decrees, conferred upon me as Provincial Commissioner,
I also sentence you to death by shooting, but I suspend that
sentence--though only until such time as you may be caught trying
to escape! And I hope you'll have just lots and lots of time in
prison, Jessup, to think about how clever you were in this
entrancing article you wrote about me! And to remember that any
nasty cold morning they may take you out in the rain and shoot
you." He ended with a mild suggestion to the guards: "And twenty
lashes!"

Two minutes later they had forced castor oil down him; he lay
trying to bite at the stained wood of the whipping-table; and he
could hear the whish of the steel fishing rod as a guard
playfully tried it out in the air before bringing it down across
the crisscross wounds of his raw back.

31

As the open prison van approached the concentration camp at
Trianon, the last light of afternoon caressed the thick birch and
maples and poplars up the pyramid of Mount Faithful. But the
grayness swiftly climbed the slope, and all the valley was left
in cold shadow. In his seat the sick Doremus drooped again in
listlessness.

The prim Georgian buildings of the girls' school which had
been turned into a concentration camp at Trianon, nine miles
north of Fort Beulah, had been worse used than Dartmouth, where
whole buildings were reserved for the luxuries of the Corpos and
their female cousins, all very snotty and parvenu. The Trianon
school seemed to have been gouged by a flood. Marble doorsteps
had been taken away. (One of them now graced the residence of the
wife of the Superintendent, Mrs. Cowlick, a woman fat, irate,
jeweled, religious, and given to announcing that all opponents of
the Chief were Communists and ought to be shot offhand.) Windows
were smashed. "Hurrah for the Chief" had been chalked on brick
walls and other chalked words, each of four letters, had been
rubbed out, not very thoroughly. The lawns and hollyhock beds
were a mess of weeds.

The buildings stood on three sides of a square; the fourth
side and the gaps between buildings were closed with unpainted
pine fences topped with strands of barbed wire.

Every room except the office of Captain Cowlick, the
Superintendent (he was as near nothing at all as any man can be
who has attained to such honors as being a captain in the
Quartermaster Corps and the head of a prison) was smeared with
filth. His office was merely dreary, and scented with whisky,
not, like the other rooms, with ammonia.

Cowlick was not too ill-natured. He wished that the camp
guards, all M.M.'s, would not treat the prisoners viciously,
except when they tried to escape. But he was a mild man; much too
mild to hurt the feelings of the M.M.'s and perhaps set up
inhibitions in their psyches by interfering with their methods of
discipline. The poor fellows probably meant well when they lashed
noisy inmates for insisting they had committed no crime. And the
good Cowlick saved Doremus's life for a while; let him lie for a
month in the stuffy hospital and have actual beef in his daily
beef stew. The prison doctor, a decayed old drunkard who had had
his medical training in the late 'eighties and who had been
somewhat close to trouble in civil life for having performed too
many abortions, was also good-natured enough, when sober, and at
last he permitted Doremus to have Dr. Marcus Olmsted in from Fort
Beulah, and for the first time in four weeks Doremus had news,
any news whatsoever, of the world beyond prison.

Where in normal life it would have been agony to wait for one
hour to know what might be happening to his friends, his family,
now for one month he had not known whether they were alive or
dead.

Dr. Olmsted--as guilty as Doremus himself of what the Corpos
called treason--dared speak to him only a moment, because the
prison doctor stayed in the hospital ward all the while, drooling
over whip-scarred patients and daubing iodine more or less near
their wounds. Olmsted sat on the edge of his cot, with its foul
blankets, unwashed for months, and muttered rapidly:

"Quick! Listen! Don't talk! Mrs. Jessup and your two girls are
all right--they're scared, but no signs of their being arrested.
Hear Lorinda Pike is all right. Your grandson, David, looks
fine--though I'm afraid he'll grow up a Corpo, like all the
youngsters. Buck Titus is alive--at another concentration
camp--the one near Woodstock. Our N.U. cell at Fort Beulah is
doing what it can--no publishing, but we forward information--get
a lot from Julian Falck--great joke: he's been promoted, M.M.
Squad-Leader now! Mary and Sissy and Father Perefixe keep
distributing pamphlets from Boston; they help the Quinn boy (my
driver) and me to forward refugees to Canada. . . . Yes, we carry
on. . . . About like an oxygen tent for a patient that's dying of
pneumonia! . . . It hurts to see you looking like a ghost,
Doremus. But you'll pull through. You've got pretty good nerves
for a little cuss! That aged-in-the-keg prison doctor is looking
this way. Bye!"

He was not permitted to see Dr. Olmsted again, but it was
probably Olmsted's influence that got him, when he was dismissed
from the hospital, still shaky but well enough to stumble about,
a vastly desirable job as sweeper of cells and corridors, cleaner
of lavatories and scrubber of toilets, instead of working in the
woods gang, up Mount Faithful, where old men who sank under the
weight of logs were said to be hammered to death by guards under
the sadistic Ensign Stoyt, when Captain Cowlick wasn't looking.
It was better, too, than the undesirable idleness of being
disciplined in the "dog house" where you lay naked, in darkness,
and where "bad cases" were reformed by being kept awake for
forty-eight or even ninety-six hours. Doremus was a conscientious
toilet-cleaner. He didn't like the work very much, but he had
pride in being able to scrub as skillfully as any professional
pearl-diver in a Greek lunch room, and satisfaction in lessening
a little the wretchedness of his imprisoned comrades by giving
them clean floors.

For, he told himself, they were his comrades. He saw that he,
who had thought of himself as a capitalist because he could hire
and fire, and because theoretically he "owned his business," had
been as helpless as the most itinerant janitor, once it seemed
worth while to the Big Business which Corpoism represented to get
rid of him. Yet he still told himself stoutly that he did not
believe in a dictatorship of the proletariat any more than he
believed in a dictatorship of the bankers and utility-owners; he
still insisted that any doctor or preacher, though economically
he might be as insecure as the humblest of his flock, who did not
feel that he was a little better than they, and privileged to
enjoy working a little harder, was a rotten doctor or a preacher
without grace. He felt that he himself had been a better and more
honorable reporter than Doc Itchitt, and a thundering sight
better student of politics than most of his shopkeeper and farmer
and factory-worker readers.

Yet bourgeois pride was so gone out of him that he was
flattered, a little thrilled, when he was universally called
"Doremus" and not "Mr. Jessup" by farmer and workman and
truck-driver and plain hobo; when they thought enough of his
courage under beating and his good-temper under being crowded
with others in a narrow cell to regard him as almost as good as
their own virile selves.

"Yes, maybe I will, Karl--after you Communists kick out all
your false prophets and bellyachers and power drunkards, and all
your press-agents for the Moscow subway."

"Well, all right, why don't you join Max Eastman? I hear he's
escaped to Mexico and has a whole big pure Trotzkyite Communist
party of seventeen members there!"

"Seventeen? Too many. What I want is mass action by just one
member, alone on a hilltop. I'm a great optimist, Karl. I still
hope America may some day rise to the standards of Kit
Carson!"

As sweeper and scrubber, Doremus had unusual chances for
gossip with other prisoners. He chuckled when he thought of how
many of his fellow criminals were acquaintances: Karl Pascal,
Henry Veeder, his own cousin, Louis Rotenstern, who looked now
like a corpse, unforgettingly wounded in his old pride of having
become a "real American," Clif Little, the jeweler, who was dying
of consumption, Ben Tripper, who had been the jolliest workman in
Medary Cole's gristmill, Professor Victor Loveland, of the
defunct Isaiah College, and Raymond Pridewell, that old Tory who
was still so contemptuous of flattery, so clean amid dirt, so
hawk-eyed, that the guards were uncomfortable when they beat him.
. . . Pascal, the Communist, Pridewell, the squirearchy
Republican, and Henry Veeder, who had never cared a hang about
politics, and who had recovered from the first shocks of
imprisonment, these three had become intimates, because they had
more arrogance of utter courage than anyone else in the
prison.

For home Doremus shared with five other men a cell twelve feet
by ten and eight feet high, which a finishing-school girl had
once considered outrageously confined for one lone young woman.
Here they slept, in two tiers of three bunks each; here they ate,
washed, played cards, read, and enjoyed the leisurely
contemplation which, as Captain Cowlick preached to them every
Sunday morning, was to reform their black souls and turn them
into loyal Corpos.

None of them, certainly not Doremus, complained much. They got
used to sleeping in a jelly of tobacco smoke and human stench, to
eating stews that always left them nervously hungry, to having no
more dignity or freedom than monkeys in a cage, as a man gets
used to the indignity of having to endure cancer. Only it left in
them a murderous hatred of their oppressors so that they, men of
peace all of them, would gladly have hanged every Corpo, mild or
vicious. Doremus understood John Brown much better.

His cell mates were Karl Pascal, Henry Veeder, and three men
whom he had not known: a Boston architect, a farm hand, and a
dope fiend who had once kept questionable restaurants. They had
good talk--especially from the dope fiend, who placidly defended
crime in a world where the only real crime had been poverty.

The worst torture to Doremus, aside from the agony of actual
floggings, was the waiting.

The Waiting. It became a distinct, tangible thing, as
individual and real as Bread or Water. How long would he be in?
How long would he be in? Night and day, asleep and waking, he
worried it, and by his bunk saw waiting the figure of Waiting, a
gray, foul ghost.

It was like waiting in a filthy station for a late train, not
for hours but for months.

Would Swan amuse himself by having Doremus taken out and shot?
He could not care much, now; he could not picture it, any more
than he could picture kissing Lorinda, walking through the woods
with Buck, playing with David and Foolish, or anything less
sensual than the ever derisive visions of roast beef with gravy,
of a hot bath, last and richest of luxuries where their only way
of washing, except for a fortnightly shower, was with a dirty
shirt dipped in the one basin of cold water for six men.

Besides Waiting, one other ghost hung about them--the notion
of Escaping. It was of that (far more than of the beastliness and
idiocy of the Corpos) that they whispered in the cell at night.
When to escape. How to escape. To sneak off through the bushes
when they were out with the woods gang? By some magic to cut
through the bars on their cell window and drop out and blessedly
not be seen by the patrols? To manage to hang on underneath one
of the prison trucks and be driven away? (A childish fantasy!)
They longed for escape as hysterically and as often as a
politician longs for votes. But they had to discuss it
cautiously, for there were stool pigeons all over the prison.

This was hard for Doremus to believe. He could not understand
a man's betraying his companions, and he did not believe it till,
two months after Doremus had gone to concentration camp, Clifford
Little betrayed to the guards Henry Veeder's plan to escape in a
hay wagon. Henry was properly dealt with. Little was released.
And Doremus, it may be, suffered over it nearly as much as either
of them, sturdily though he tried to argue that Little had
tuberculosis and that the often beatings had bled out his
soul.

Each prisoner was permitted one visitor a fortnight and, in
sequence, Doremus saw Emma, Mary, Sissy, David. But always an
M.M. was standing two feet away, listening, and Doremus had from
them nothing more than a fluttering, "We're all fine--we hear
Buck is all right--we hear Lorinda is doing fine in her new tea
room--Philip writes he is all right." And once came Philip
himself, his pompous son, more pompous than ever now as a Corpo
judge, and very hurt about his father's insane
radicalism--considerably more hurt when Doremus tartly observed
that he would much rather have had the dog Foolish for
visitor.

And there were letters--all censored--worse than useless to a
man who had been so glad to hear the living voices of his
friends.

In the long run, these frustrate visits, these empty letters,
made his waiting the more dismal, because they suggested that
perhaps he was wrong in his nightly visions; perhaps the world
outside was not so loving and eager and adventurous as he
remembered it, but only dreary as his cell.

He had little known Karl Pascal, yet now the argumentative
Marxian was his nearest friend, his one amusing consolation. Karl
could and did prove that the trouble with leaky valves, sour cow
pastures, the teaching of calculus, and all novels was their
failure to be guided by the writings of Lenin.

In his new friendship, Doremus was old-maidishly agitated lest
Karl be taken out and shot, the recognition usually given to
Communists. He discovered that he need not worry. Karl had been
in jail before. He was the trained agitator for whom Doremus had
longed in New Underground days. He had ferreted out so many
scandals about the financial and sexual shenanigans of every one
of the guards that they were afraid that even while he was being
shot, he might tattle to the firing-squad. They were much more
anxious for his good opinion than for that of Captain Cowlick,
and they timidly brought him little presents of chewing tobacco
and Canadian newspapers, as though they were schoolchildren
honeying up to teacher.

When Aras Dilley was transferred from night patrols in Fort
Beulah to the position of guard at Trianon--a reward for having
given to Shad Ledue certain information about R. C. Crowley which
cost that banker hundreds of dollars--Aras, that slinker, that
able snooper, jumped at the sight of Karl and began to look pious
and kind. He had known Karl before!

Despite the presence of Stoyt, Ensign of guards, an ex-cashier
who had once enjoyed shooting dogs and who now, in the blessed
escape of Corpoism, enjoyed lashing human beings, the camp at
Trianon was not so cruel as the district prison at Hanover. But
from the dirty window of his cell Doremus saw horrors enough.

One mid-morning, a radiant September morning with the air
already savoring the peace of autumn, he saw the firing-squad
marching out his cousin, Henry Veeder, who had recently tried to
escape. Henry had been a granite monolith of a man. He had walked
like a soldier. He had, in his cell, been proud of shaving every
morning, as once he had done, with a tin basin of water heated on
the stove, in the kitchen of his old white house up on Mount
Terror. Now he stooped, and toward death he walked with dragging
feet. His face of a Roman senator was smeared from the cow dung
into which they had flung him for his last slumber.

As they tramped out through the quadrangle gate, Ensign Stoyt,
commanding the squad, halted Henry, laughed at him, and calmly
kicked him in the groin.

They lifted him up. Three minutes later Doremus heard a ripple
of shots. Three minutes after that the squad came back bearing on
an old door a twisted clay figure with vacant open eyes. Then
Doremus cried aloud. As the bearers slanted the stretcher, the
figure rolled to the ground.

But one thing worse he was to see through the accursed window.
The guards drove in, as new prisoners, Julian Falck, in torn
uniform, and Julian's grandfather, so fragile, so silvery, so
bewildered and terrified in his muddied clericals.

He saw them kicked across the quadrangle into a building once
devoted to instruction in dancing and the more delicate airs for
the piano; devoted now to the torture room and the solitary
cells.

Not for two weeks, two weeks of waiting that was like
ceaseless ache, did he have a chance, at exercise hour, to speak
for a moment to Julian, who muttered, "They caught me writing
some inside dope about M.M. graft. It was to have gone to Sissy.
Thank God, nothing on it to show who it was for!" Julian had
passed on. But Doremus had had time to see that his eyes were
hopeless, and that his neat, smallish, clerical face was
blue-black with bruises.

The administration (or so Doremus guessed) decided that
Julian, the first spy among the M.M.'s who had been caught in the
Fort Beulah region, was too good a subject of sport to be
wastefully shot at once. He should be kept for an example. Often
Doremus saw the guards kick him across the quadrangle to the
whipping room and imagined that he could hear Julian's shrieks
afterward. He wasn't even kept in a punishment cell, but in an
open barred den on an ordinary corridor, so that passing inmates
could peep in and see him, welts across his naked back, huddled
on the floor, whimpering like a beaten dog.

And Doremus had sight of Julian's grandfather sneaking across
the quadrangle, stealing a soggy hunk of bread from a garbage
can, and fiercely chewing at it.

All through September Doremus worried lest Sissy, with Julian
now gone from Fort Beulah, be raped by Shad Ledue. . . . Shad
would leer the while, and gloat over his ascent from hired man to
irresistible master.

Despite his anguish over the Falcks and Henry Veeder and every
uncouthest comrade in prison, Doremus was almost recovered from
his beatings by late September. He began delightedly to believe
that he would live for another ten years; was slightly ashamed of
his delight, in the presence of so much agony, but he felt like a
young man and--And straightway Ensign Stoyt was there (two or
three o'clock at night it must have been), yanking Doremus out of
his bunk, pulling him to his feet, knocking him down again with
so violent a crack in his mouth that Doremus instantly sank again
into all his trembling fear, all his inhuman groveling.

He was dragged into Captain Cowlick's office.

The Captain was courtly:

"Mr. Jessup, we have information that you were connected with
Squad-Leader Julian Falck's treachery. He has, uh, well, to be
frank, he's broken down and confessed. Now you yourself are in no
danger, no danger whatever, of further punishment, if you will
just help us. But we really must make a warning of young Mr.
Falck, and so if you will tell us all you know about the boy's
shocking infidelity to the colors, we shall hold it in your
favor. How would you like to have a nice bedroom to sleep in, all
by yourself?"

A quarter hour later Doremus was still swearing that he knew
nothing whatever of any "subversive activities" on the part of
Julian.

Captain Cowlick said, rather testily, "Well, since you refuse
to respond to our generosity, I must leave you to Ensign Stoyt,
I'm afraid. . . . Be gentle with him, Ensign."

"Yessr," said the Ensign.

The Captain wearily trotted out of the room and Stoyt did
indeed speak with gentleness, which was a surprise to Doremus,
because in the room were two of the guards to whom Stoyt liked to
show off:

"Jessup, you're a man of intelligence. No use your trying to
protect this boy, Falck, because we've got enough on him to
execute him anyway. So it won't be hurting him any if you give us
a few more details about his treason. And you'll be doing
yourself a good turn."

Doremus said nothing.

"Going to talk?"

Doremus shook his head.

"All right, then. . . . Tillett!"

"Yessr."

"Bring in the guy that squealed on Jessup!"

Doremus expected the guard to fetch Julian, but it was
Julian's grandfather who wavered into the room. In the camp
quadrangle Doremus had often seen him trying to preserve the
dignity of his frock coat by rubbing at the spots with a wet rag,
but in the cells there were no hooks for clothes, and the
priestly garment--Mr. Falck was a poor man and it had not been
very expensive at best--was grotesquely wrinkled now. He was
blinking with sleepiness, and his silver hair was a hurrah's
nest.

Stoyt (he was thirty or so) said cheerfully to the two elders,
"Well, now, you boys better stop being naughty and try to get
some sense into your mildewed old brains, and then we can all
have some decent sleep. Why don't you two try to be honest, now
that you've each confessed that the other was a traitor?"

"What?" marveled Doremus.

"Sure! Old Falck here says you carried his grandson's pieces
to the Vermont Vigilance. Come on, now, if you'll tell us
who published that rag--"

"I have confessed nothing. I have nothing to confess," said
Mr. Falck.

Stoyt screamed, "Will you shut up? You old hypocrite!" Stoyt
knocked him to the floor, and as Mr. Falck weaved dizzily on
hands and knees, kicked him in the side with a heavy boot. The
other two guards were holding back the sputtering Doremus. Stoyt
jeered at Mr. Falck, "Well, you old bastard, you're on your
knees, so let's hear you pray!"

"I shall!"

In agony Mr. Falck raised his head, dust-smeared from the
floor, straightened his shoulders, held up trembling hands, and
with such sweetness in his voice as Doremus had once heard in it
when men were human, he cried, "Father, Thou hast forgiven so
long! Forgive them not but curse them, for they know what they
do!" He tumbled forward, and Doremus knew that he would never
hear that voice again.

In La Voix littéraire of Paris, the celebrated
and genial professor of belles-lettres, Guillaume Semit, wrote
with his accustomed sympathy:

I do not pretend to any knowledge of politics, and probably
what I saw on my fourth journey to the States United this summer
of 1938 was mostly on the surface and cannot be considered a
profound analysis of the effects of Corpoism, but I assure you
that I have never before seen that nation so great, our young and
gigantic cousin in the West, in such bounding health and good
spirits. I leave it to my economic confrères to explain
such dull phenomena as wage-scales, and tell only what I saw,
which is that the innumerable parades and vast athletic
conferences of the Minute Men and the lads and lassies of the
Corpo Youth Movement exhibited such rosy, contented faces, such
undeviating enthusiasm for their hero, the Chief, M. Windrip,
that involuntarily I exclaimed, "Here is a whole nation dipped in
the River of Youth."

Everywhere in the country was such feverish rebuilding of
public edifices and apartment houses for the poor as has never
hitherto been known. In Washington, my old colleague, M. le
Secretary Macgoblin, was so good as to cry, in that virile yet
cultivated manner of his which is so well known, "Our enemies
maintain that our labor camps are virtual slavery. Come, my old
one! You shall see for yourself." He conducted me by one of the
marvelously speedy American automobiles to such a camp, near
Washington, and having the workers assembled, he put to them
frankly: "Are you low in the heart?" As one man they chorused,
"No," with a spirit like our own brave soldiers on the ramparts
of Verdun.

During the full hour we spent there, I was permitted to roam
at will, asking such questions as I cared to, through the offices
of the interpreter kindly furnished by His Excellency, M. le Dr.
Macgoblin, and every worker whom I thus approached assured me
that never has he been so well fed, so tenderly treated, and so
assisted to find an almost poetic interest in his chosen work as
in this labor camp--this scientific cooperation for the
well-being of all.

With a certain temerity I ventured to demand of M. Macgoblin
what truth was there in the reports so shamefully circulated
(especially, alas, in our beloved France) that in the
concentration camps the opponents of Corpoism are ill fed and
harshly treated. M. Macgoblin explained to me that there are no
such things as "concentration camps," if that term is to carry
any penological significance. They are, actually, schools, in
which adults who have unfortunately been misled by the glib
prophets of that milk-and-water religion, "Liberalism," are
reconditioned to comprehend the new day of authoritative economic
control. In such camps, he assured me, there are actually no
guards, but only patient teachers, and men who were once utterly
uncomprehending of Corpoism, and therefore opposed to it, are now
daily going forth as the most enthusiastic disciples of the
Chief.

Alas that France and Great Britain should still be thrashing
about in the slough of Parliamentarianism and so-called
Democracy, daily sinking deeper into debt and paralysis of
industry, because of the cowardice and traditionalism of our
Liberal leaders, feeble and outmoded men who are afraid to plump
for either Fascism or Communism; who dare not--or who are too
power hungry--to cast off outmoded techniques, like the Germans,
Americans, Italians, Turks, and other really courageous peoples,
and place the sane and scientific control of the all-powerful
Totalitarian State in the hands of Men of Resolution!

In October, John Pollikop, arrested on suspicion of having
just possibly helped a refugee to escape, arrived in the Trianon
camp, and the first words between him and his friend Karl Pascal
were no inquiries about health, but a derisive interchange, as
though they were continuing a conversation broken only half an
hour before:

"Well, you old Bolshevik, I told you so! If you Communists had
joined with me and Norman Thomas to back Frank Roosevelt, we
wouldn't be here now!"

"Rats! Why, it's Thomas and Roosevelt that started Fascism! I
ask you! Now shut up, John, and listen: What was the New Deal but
pure Fascism? Whadthey do to the worker? Look here! No, wait now,
listen--"

Doremus felt at home again, and comforted--though he did also
feel that Foolish probably had more constructive economic wisdom
than John Pollikop, Karl Pascal, Herbert Hoover, Buzz Windrip,
Lee Sarason, and himself put together; or if not, Foolish had the
sense to conceal his lack of wisdom by pretending that he could
not speak English.

Shad Ledue, back in his hotel suite, reflected that he was
getting a dirty deal. He had been responsible for sending more
traitors to concentration camps than any other county
commissioner in the province, yet he had not been promoted.

It was late; he was just back from a dinner given by Francis
Tasbrough in honor of Provincial Commissioner Swan and a board
consisting of Judge Philip Jessup, Director of Education Owen J.
Peaseley, and Brigadier Kippersly, who were investigating the
ability of Vermont to pay more taxes.

Shad felt discontented. All those damned snobs trying to show
off! Talking at dinner about this bum show in New York--this
first Corpo revue, Callin' Stalin, written by Lee Sarason
and Hector Macgoblin. How those nuts had put on the agony about
"Corpo art," and "drama freed from Jewish suggestiveness" and
"the pure line of Anglo-Saxon sculpture" and even, by God, about
"Corporate physics"! Simply trying to show off! And they had paid
no attention to Shad when he had told his funny story about the
stuck-up preacher in Fort Beulah, one Falck, who had been so
jealous because the M.M.'s drilled on Sunday morning instead of
going to his gospel shop that he had tried to get his grandson to
make up lies about the M.M.'s, and whom Shad had amusingly
arrested right in his own church! Not paid one bit of attention
to him, even though he had carefully read all through the Chief's
Zero Hour so he could quote it, and though he had been
careful to be refined in his table manners and to stick out his
little finger when he drank from a glass.

He was lonely.

The fellows he had once best known, in pool room and barber
shop, seemed frightened of him, now, and the dirty snobs like
Tasbrough still ignored him.

He was lonely for Sissy Jessup.

Since her dad had been sent to Trianon, Shad didn't seem able
to get her to come around to his rooms, even though he was the
County Commissioner and she was nothing now but the busted
daughter of a criminal.

And he was crazy about her. Why, he'd be almost willing to
marry her, if he couldn't get her any other way! But when he had
hinted as much--or almost as much--she had just laughed at him,
the dirty little snob!

He had thought, when he was a hired man, that there was a lot
more fun in being rich and famous. He didn't feel one bit
different than he had then! Funny!

32

Dr. Lionel Adams, B.A. of Yale, Ph.D. of Chicago, Negro, had
been a journalist, American consul in Africa and, at the time of
Berzelius Windrip's election, professor of anthropology in Howard
University. As with all his colleagues, his professorship was
taken over by a most worthy and needy white man, whose training
in anthropology had been as photographer on one expedition to
Yucatan. In the dissension between the Booker Washington school
of Negroes who counseled patience in the new subjection of the
Negroes to slavery, and the radicals who demanded that they join
the Communists and struggle for the economic freedom of all,
white or black, Professor Adams took the mild, Fabian former
position.

He went over the country preaching to his people that they
must be "realistic," and make what future they could; not in some
Utopian fantasy but on the inescapable basis of the ban against
them.

Near Burlington, Vermont, there is a small colony of Negroes,
truck farmers, gardeners, houseworkers, mostly descended from
slaves who, before the Civil War, escaped to Canada by the
"Underground Railway" conducted by such zealots as Truman Webb's
grandfather, but who sufficiently loved the land of their
forcible adoption to return to America after the war. From the
colony had gone to the great cities young colored people who
(before the Corpo emancipation) had been nurses, doctors,
merchants, officials.

This colony Professor Adams addressed, bidding the young
colored rebels to seek improvement within their own souls rather
than in mere social superiority.

As he was in person unknown to this Burlington colony, Captain
Oscar Ledue, nicknamed "Shad," was summoned to censor the
lecture. He sat hulked down in a chair at the back of the hall.
Aside from addresses by M.M. officers, and moral inspiration by
his teachers in grammar school, it was the first lecture he had
ever heard in his life, and he didn't think much of it. He was
irritated that this stuck-up nigger didn't spiel like the
characters of Octavus Roy Cohen, one of Shad's favorite authors,
but had the nerve to try to sling English just as good as Shad
himself. It was more irritating that the loud-mouthed pup should
look so much like a bronze statue, and finally, it was simply
more than a guy could stand that the big bum should be wearing a
Tuxedo!

So when Adams, as he called himself, claimed that there were
good poets and teachers and even doctors and engineers among the
niggers, which was plainly an effort to incite folks to rebellion
against the government, Shad signaled his squad and arrested
Adams in the midst of his lecture, addressing him, "You God-damn
dirty, ignorant, stinking nigger! I'm going to shut your big
mouth for you, for keeps!"

Dr. Adams was taken to the Trianon concentration camp. Ensign
Stoyt thought it would be a good joke on those fresh beggars
(almost Communists, you might say) Jessup and Pascal to lodge the
nigger right in the same cell with them. But they actually seemed
to like Adams; talked to him as though he were white and
educated! So Stoyt placed him in a solitary cell, where he could
think over his crime in having bitten the hand that had fed
him.

The greatest single shock that ever came to the Trianon camp
was in November, 1938, when there appeared among them, as the
newest prisoner, Shad Ledue.

It was he who was responsible for nearly half of them being
there.

The prisoners whispered that he had been arrested on charges
by Francis Tasbrough; officially, for having grafted on
shopkeepers; unofficially, for having failed to share enough of
the graft with Tasbrough. But such cloudy causes were less
discussed than the question of how they would murder Shad now
they had him safe.

All Minute Men who were under discipline, except only such
Reds as Julian Falck, were privileged prisoners in the
concentration camps; they were safeguarded against the common,
i.e., criminal, i.e., political inmates; and most of them, once
reformed, were returned to the M.M. ranks, with a greatly
improved knowledge of how to flog malcontents. Shad was housed by
himself in a single cell like a not-too-bad hall-bedroom, and
every evening he was permitted to spend two hours in the
officers' mess room. The scum could not get at him, because his
exercise hour was at a time different from theirs.

Doremus begged the plotters against Shad to restrain
themselves.

"Good Lord, Doremus, do you mean that after the sure-enough
battles we've gone through you're still a bourgeois
pacifist--that you still believe in the sanctity of a lump of hog
meat like Ledue?" demanded Karl Pascal.

"Well, yes, I do--a little. I know that Shad came from a
family of twelve underfed brats up on Mount Terror. Not much
chance. But more important than that, I don't believe in
individual assassination as an effective means of fighting
despotism. The blood of the tyrants is the seed of the massacre
and--"

"Are you taking a cue from me and quoting sound doctrine when
it's the time for a little liquidation?" said Karl. "This one
tyrant's going to lose a lot of blood!"

The Pascal whom Doremus had considered as, at his most
violent, only a gas bag, looked at him with a stare in which all
friendliness was frozen. Karl demanded of his cell mates, a
different set now than at Doremus's arrival, "Shall we get rid of
this typhus germ, Ledue?"

John Pollikop, Truman Webb, the surgeon, the carpenter, each
of them nodded, slowly, without feeling.

At exercise hour, the discipline of the men marching out to
the quadrangle was broken when one prisoner stumbled, with a cry,
knocked over another man, and loudly apologized--just at the
barred entrance of Shad Ledue's cell. The accident made a knot
collect before the cell. Doremus, on the edge of it, saw Shad
looking out, his wide face blank with fear.

Someone, somehow, had lighted and thrown into Shad's cell a
large wad of waste, soaked with gasoline. It caught the thin
wallboard which divided Shad's cell from the next. The whole room
looked presently like the fire box of a furnace. Shad was
screaming, as he beat at his sleeves, his shoulders. Doremus
remembered the scream of a horse clawed by wolves in the Far
North.

When they got Shad out, he was dead. He had no face at
all.

Captain Cowlick was deposed as superintendent of the camp, and
vanished to the insignificance whence he had come. He was
succeeded by Shad's friend, the belligerent Snake Tizra, now a
battalion-leader. His first executive act was to have all the two
hundred inmates drawn up in the quadrangle and to announce, "I'm
not going to tell you guys anything about how I'm going to feed
you or sleep you till I've finished putting the fear of God into
every one of you murderers!"

There were offers of complete pardon for anyone who would
betray the man who had thrown the burning waste into Shad's cell.
It was followed by enthusiastic private offers from the prisoners
that anyone who did thus tattle would not live to get out. So, as
Doremus had guessed, they all suffered more than Shad's death had
been worth--and to him, thinking of Sissy, thinking of Shad's
testimony at Hanover, it had been worth a great deal; it had been
very precious and lovely.

A court of special inquiry was convened, with Provincial
Commissioner Effingham Swan himself presiding (he was very busy
with all bad works; he used aeroplanes to be about them). Ten
prisoners, one out of every twenty in the camp, were chosen by
lot and shot summarily. Among them was Professor Victor Loveland,
who, for all his rags and scars, was neatly academic to the last,
with his eyeglasses and his slick tow-colored hair parted in the
middle as he looked at the firing-squad.

Suspects like Julian Falck were beaten more often, kept longer
in those cells in which one could not stand, sit, nor lie.

Then, for two weeks in December, all visitors and all letters
were forbidden, and newly arrived prisoners were shut off by
themselves; and the cell mates, like boys in a dormitory, would
sit up till midnight in whispered discussion as to whether this
was more vengeance by Snake Tizra, or whether something was
happening in the World Outside that was too disturbing for the
prisoners to know.

33

When the Falcks and John Pollikop had been arrested and had
joined her father in prison, when such more timid rebels as Mungo
Kitterick and Harry Kindermann had been scared away from New
Underground activities, Mary Greenhill had to take over the
control of the Fort Beulah cell, with only Sissy, Father
Perefixe, Dr. Olmsted and his driver, and half-a-dozen other
agents left, and control it she did, with angry devotion and not
too much sense. All she could do was to help in the escape of
refugees and to forward such minor anti-Corpo news items as she
could discover, with Julian gone.

The demon that had grown within her ever since her husband had
been executed now became a great tumor, and Mary was furious at
inaction. Quite gravely she talked about assassinations--and long
before the day of Mary Greenhill, daughter of Doremus,
gold-armored tyrants in towers had trembled at the menace of
young widows in villages among the dark hills.

She wanted, first, to kill Shad Ledue who (she did not know,
but guessed) had probably done the actual shooting of her
husband. But in this small place it might hurt her family even
more than they had been hurt. She humorlessly suggested, before
Shad was arrested and murdered, that it would be a pretty piece
of espionage for Sissy to go and live with him. The once flippant
Sissy, so thin and quiet ever since her Julian had been taken
away, was certain that Mary had gone mad, and at night was
terrified. . . . She remembered how Mary, in the days when she
had been a crystal-hard, crystal-bright sportswoman, had with her
riding-crop beaten a farmer who had tortured a dog.

Mary was fed-up with the cautiousness of Dr. Olmsted and
Father Perefixe, men who rather liked a vague state called
Freedom but did not overmuch care for being lynched. She stormed
at them. Call themselves men? Why didn't they go out and
do something?

At home, she was irritated by her mother, who lamented hardly
more about Doremus's jailing than she did about the beloved
little tables that had been smashed during his arrest.

It was equally the blasts about the greatness of the new
Provincial Commissioner, Effingham Swan, in the Corpo press and
memoranda in the secret N.U. reports about his quick death
verdicts against prisoners that made her decide to kill this
dignitary. Even more than Shad (who had not yet been sent to
Trianon), she blamed him for Fowler's fate. She thought it out
quite calmly. That was the sort of thinking that the Corpos were
encouraging among decent home-body women by their program for
revitalizing national American pride.

Except with babies accompanying mothers, two visitors together
were forbidden in the concentration camps. So, when Mary saw
Doremus and, in another camp, Buck Titus, in early October, she
could only murmur, in almost the same words to each of them,
"Listen! When I leave you I'll hold up David--but, heavens, what
a husky lump he's become!--at the gate, so you can see him. If
anything should ever happen to me, if I should get sick or
something, when you get out you'll take care of David--won't you,
won't you?"

She was trying to be matter-of-fact, that they might not
worry. She was not succeeding very well.

So she drew out, from the small fund which her father had
established for her after Fowler's death, enough money for a
couple of months, executed a power of attorney by which either
her mother or her sister could draw the rest, casually kissed
David and Emma and Sissy good-bye, and--chatty and gay as she
took the train--went off to Albany, capital of the Northeastern
Province. The story was that she needed a change and was going to
stay near Albany with Fowler's married sister.

She did actually stay with her sister-in-law--long enough to
get her bearings. Two days after her arrival, she went to the new
Albany training-field of the Corpo Women's Flying Corps and
enlisted for lessons in aviation and bombing.

When the inevitable war should come, when the government
should decide whether it was Canada, Mexico, Russia, Cuba, Japan,
or perhaps Staten Island that was "menacing her borders," and
proceed to defend itself outwards, then the best women flyers of
the Corps were to have Commissions in an official army auxiliary.
The old-fashioned "rights" granted to women by the Liberals might
(for their own sakes) be taken from them, but never had they had
more right to die in battle.

While she was learning, she wrote to her family
reassuringly--mostly postcards to David, bidding him mind
whatever his grandmother said.

She lived in a lively boarding-house, filled with M.M.
officers who knew all about and talked a little about the
frequent inspection trips of Commissioner Swan, by aeroplane. She
was complimented by quite a number of insulting proposals
there.

She had driven a car ever since she had been fifteen: in
Boston traffic, across the Quebec plains, on rocky hill roads in
a blizzard; she had made repairs at midnight; and she had an
accurate eye, nerves trained outdoors, and the resolute
steadiness of a madman evading notice while he plots death. After
ten hours of instruction, by an M.M. aviator who thought the air
was as good a place as any to make love in and who could never
understand why Mary laughed at him, she made her first solo
flight, with an admirable landing. The instructor said (among
other things less apropos) that she had no fear; that the one
thing she needed for mastery was a little fear.

Meantime she was an obedient student in classes in bombing, a
branch of culture daily more propagated by the Corpos.

She was particularly interested in the Mills hand grenade. You
pulled out the safety pin, holding the lever against the grenade
with your fingers, and tossed. Five seconds after the lever was
thus loosened, the grenade exploded and killed a lot of people.
It had never been used from planes, but it might be worth trying,
thought Mary. M.M. officers told her that Swan, when a mob of
steel-workers had been kicked out of a plant and started rioting,
had taken command of the peace officers, and himself (they
chuckled with admiration of his readiness) hurled such a grenade.
It had killed two women and a baby.

Mary took her sixth solo flight on a November morning gray and
quiet under snow clouds. She had never been very talkative with
the ground crew but this morning she said it excited her to think
she could leave the ground "like a reg'lar angel" and shoot up
and hang around that unknown wilderness of clouds. She patted a
strut of her machine, a high-wing Leonard monoplane with open
cockpit, a new and very fast military machine, meant for both
pursuit and quick jobs of bombing . . . quick jobs of
slaughtering a few hundred troops in close formation.

At the field, as she had been informed he would, District
Commissioner Effingham Swan was boarding his big official cabin
plane for a flight presumably into New England. He was tall; a
distinguished, military-looking, polo-suggesting dignitary in
masterfully simple blue serge with just a light flying-helmet. A
dozen yes-men buzzed about him--secretaries, bodyguards, a
chauffeur, a couple of county commissioners, educational
directors, labor directors--their hats in their hands, their
smiles on their faces, their souls wriggling with gratitude to
him for permitting them to exist. He snapped at them a good deal
and bustled. As he mounted the steps to the cabin (Mary thought
of "Casey Jones" and smiled), a messenger on a tremendous
motorcycle blared up with the last telegrams. There seemed to be
half a hundred of the yellow envelopes, Mary marveled. He tossed
them to the secretary who was humbly creeping after him. The door
of the viceregal coach closed on the Commissioner, the secretary,
and two bodyguards lumpy with guns.

It was said that in his plane Swan had a desk that had
belonged to Hitler, and before him to Marat.

To Mary, who had just lifted herself up into the cockpit, a
mechanic cried, admiringly pointing after Swan's plane as it
lurched forward, "Gee, what a grand guy that is--Boss Swan. I
hear where he's flying down to Washington to chin with the Chief
this morning--gee, think of it, with the Chief!"

"Wouldn't it be awful if somebody took a shot at Mr. Swan and
the Chief? Might change all history," Mary shouted down.

"No chance of that! See those guards of his? Say, they could
stand off a whole regiment--they could lick Walt Trowbridge and
all the other Communists put together!"

"Ha, ha! That's good! But couple days ago I heard where a
fellow was saying he figured out God had gone to sleep."

"Maybe it's time for Him to wake up!" said Mary, and raised
her hand.

Her plane had a top of two hundred and eighty-five miles an
hour--Swan's golden chariot had but two hundred and thirty. She
was presently flying above and a little behind him. His cabin
plane, which had seemed huge as the Queen Mary when she
had looked up at its wing-spread on the ground, now seemed small
as a white dove, wavering above the patchy linoleum that was the
ground.

She drew from the pockets of her flying-jacket the three Mills
hand grenades she had managed to steal from the school yesterday
afternoon. She had not been able to get away with any heavier
bomb. As she looked at them, for the first time she shuddered;
she became a thing of warmer blood than a mere attachment to the
plane, mechanical as the engine.

"Better get it over before I go ladylike," she sighed, and
dived at the cabin plane.

No doubt her coming was unwelcome. Neither Death nor Mary
Greenhill had made a formal engagement with Effingham Swan that
morning; neither had telephoned, nor bargained with irritable
secretaries, nor been neatly typed down on the great lord's
schedule for his last day of life. In his dozen offices, in his
marble home, in council hall and royal reviewing-stand, his most
precious excellence was guarded with steel. He could not be
approached by vulgarians like Mary Greenhill--save in the air,
where emperor and vulgarian alike are upheld only by toy wings
and by the grace of God.

Three times Mary maneuvered above his plane and dropped a
grenade. Each time it missed. The cabin plane was descending, to
land, and the guards were shooting up at her.

"Oh well!" she said, and dived bluntly at a bright metal
wing.

In her last ten seconds she thought how much the wing looked
like the zinc washboard which, as a girl, she had seen used by
Mrs. Candy's predecessor--now what was her name?--Mamie or
something. And she wished she had spent more time with David the
last few months. And she noticed that the cabin plane seemed
rather rushing up at her than she down at it.

The crash was appalling. It came just as she was patting her
parachute and rising to leap out--too late. All she saw was an
insane whirligig of smashed wings and huge engines that seemed to
have been hurled up into her face.

34

Speaking of Julian before he was arrested, probably the New
Underground headquarters in Montreal found no unusual value in
his reports on M.M. grafting and cruelty and plans for
apprehending N.U. agitators. Still, he had been able to warn four
or five suspects to escape to Canada. He had had to assist in
several floggings. He trembled so that the others laughed at him;
and he made his blows suspiciously light.

He was set on being promoted to M.M. district headquarters in
Hanover, and for it he studied typing and shorthand in his free
time. He had a beautiful plan of going to that old family friend,
Commissioner Francis Tasbrough, declaring that he wanted by his
own noble qualities to make up to the divine government for his
father's disloyalty, and of getting himself made Tasbrough's
secretary. If he could just peep at Tasbrough's private files!
Then there would be something juicy for Montreal!

Sissy and he discussed it exultantly in their leafy
rendezvous. For a whole half hour she was able to forget her
father and Buck in prison, and what seemed to her something like
madness in Mary's increasing restlessness.

Just at the end of September she saw Julian suddenly
arrested.

She was watching a review of M.M.'s on the Green. She might
theoretically detest the blue M.M. uniform as being all that Walt
Trowbridge (frequently) called it, "The old-time emblem of
heroism and the battle for freedom, sacrilegiously turned by
Windrip and his gang into a symbol of everything that is cruel,
tyrannical, and false," but it did not dampen her pride in Julian
to see him trim and shiny, and officially set apart as a
squad-leader commanding his minor army of ten.

While the company stood at rest, County Commissioner Shad
Ledue dashed up in a large car, sprang up, strode to Julian,
bellowed, "This guy--this man is a traitor!" tore the M.M.
steering-wheel from Julian's collar, struck him in the face, and
turned him over to his private gunmen, while Julian's mates
groaned, guffawed, hissed, and yelped.

She was not allowed to see Julian at Trianon. She could learn
nothing save that he had not yet been executed.

When Mary was killed, and buried as a military heroine, Philip
came bumbling up from his Massachusetts judicial circuit. He
shook his head a great deal and pursed his lips.

"I swear," he said to Emma and Sissy--though actually he did
nothing so wholesome and natural as to swear--"I swear I'm almost
tempted to think, sometimes, that both Father and Mary have, or
shall I say had, a touch of madness in them. There must be,
terrible though it is to say it, but we must face facts in these
troublous days, but I honestly think, sometimes, there must be a
strain of madness somewhere in our family. Thank God I have
escaped it!--if I have no other virtues, at least I am certainly
sane! even if that may have caused the Pater to think I was
nothing but mediocre! And of course you are entirely free from
it, Mater. It's you that must watch yourself, Cecilia." (Sissy
jumped slightly; not at anything so grateful as being called
crazy by Philip, but at being called "Cecilia." After all, she
admitted, that probably was her name.) "I hate to say it,
Cecilia, but I've often thought you had a dangerous tendency to
be thoughtless and selfish. Now Mater: as you know, I'm a very
busy man, and I simply can't take a lot of time arguing and
discussing, but it seems best to me, and I think I can almost say
that it seems wise to Merilla, also, that, now that Mary has
passed on, you should just close up this big house, or much
better, try to rent it, as long as the poor Pater is--uh--as long
as he's away. I don't pretend to have as big a place as this, but
it's ever so much more modern, with gas furnace and up-to-date
plumbing and all, and I have one of the first television sets in
Rose Lane. I hope it won't hurt your feelings, and as you know,
whatever people may say about me, certainly I'm one of the first
to believe in keeping up the old traditions, just as poor dear
old Eff Swan was, but at the same time, it seems to me that the
old home here is a little on the dreary and old-fashioned
side--of course I never could persuade the Pater to bring
it up to date, but--Anyway, I want Davy and you to come live with
us in Worcester, immediately. As for you, Sissy, you will of
course understand that you are entirely welcome, but perhaps you
would prefer to do something livelier, such as joining the
Women's Corpo Auxiliary--"

He was, Sissy raged, so damned kind to everybody! She
couldn't even stir herself to insult him much. She earnestly
desired to, when she found that he had brought David an M.M.
uniform, and when David put it on and paraded about shouting,
like most of the boys he played with, "Hail Windrip!"

She telephoned to Lorinda Pike at Beecher Falls and was able
to tell Philip that she was going to help Lorinda in the tea
room. Emma and David went off to Worcester--at the last moment,
at the station, Emma decided to be pretty teary about it, though
David begged her to remember that they had Uncle Philip's word
for it that Worcester was just the same as Boston, London,
Hollywood, and a Wild West Ranch put together. Sissy stayed to
get the house rented. Mrs. Candy, who was going to open her
bakery now and who never did inform the impractical Sissy whether
or no she was being paid for these last weeks, made for Sissy all
the foreign dishes that only Sissy and Doremus cared for, and
they not uncheerfully dined together, in the kitchen.

So it was Shad's time to swoop.

He came blusteringly calling on her, in November. Never had
she hated him quite so much, yet never so much feared him,
because of what he might do to her father and Julian and Buck and
the others in concentration camps.

He grunted, "Well, your boy-friend Jule, that thought he was
so cute, the poor heel, we got all the dope on his
double-crossing us, all right! He'll never bother you
again!"

"He's not so bad. Let's forget him. . . . Shall I play you
something on the piano?"

"Sure. Shoot. I always did like high-class music," said the
refined Commissioner, lolling on a couch, putting his heels up on
a damask chair, in the room where once he had cleaned the
fireplace. If it was his serious purpose to discourage Sissy in
regard to that anti-Corpo institution, the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat, he was succeeding even better than Judge Philip
Jessup. Sir William Gilbert would have said of Shad that he was
so very, very prolet-ari-an.

She had played for but five minutes when he forgot that he was
now refined, and bawled, "Oh, cut out the highbrow stuff and come
on and sit down!"

She stayed on the piano stool. Just what would she do if Shad
became violent? There was no Julian to appear melodramatically at
the nickoftime and rescue her. Then she remembered Mrs. Candy, in
the kitchen, and was content.

"What the heck you snickerin' at?" said Shad.

"Oh--oh I was just thinking about that story you told me about
how Mr. Falck bleated when you arrested him!"

"Yeh, that was comical. Old Reverend certainly blatted like a
goat!"

(Could she kill him? Would it be wise to kill him? Had Mary
meant to kill Swan? Would They be harder on Julian and her father
if she killed Shad? Incidentally, did it hurt much to get
hanged?)

He was yawning, "Well, Sis, ole kid, how about you and me
taking a little trip to New York in a couple weeks? See some high
life. I'll get you the best soot in the best hotel in town, and
we'll take in some shows--I hear this Callin' Stalin is a
hot number--real Corpo art--and I'll buy you some honest-to-God
champagne wine! And then if we find we like each other enough,
I'm willing for us, if you are, to get hitched!"

"But, Shad! We could never live on your salary. I mean--I mean
of course the Corpos ought to pay you better--mean, even better
than they do."

"Listen, baby! I ain't going to have to get along on any
miserable county commissioner's salary the rest of my life!
Believe me, I'm going to be a millionaire before very long!"

Then he told her: told her precisely the sort of discreditable
secret for which she had so long fished in vain. Perhaps it was
because he was sober. Shad, when drunk, reversed all the rules
and became more peasant-like and cautious with each drink.

He had a plan. That plan was as brutal and as infeasible as
any plan of Shad Ledue for making large money would be. Its
essence was that he should avoid manual labor and should make as
many persons miserable as possible. It was like his plan, when he
was still a hired man, to become wealthy by breeding dogs--first
stealing the dogs and, preferably, the kennels.

As County Commissioner he had not merely, as was the Corpo
custom, been bribed by the shopkeepers and professional men for
protection against the M.M.'s. He had actually gone into
partnership with them, promising them larger M.M. orders, and, he
boasted, he had secret contracts with these merchants all written
down and signed and tucked away in his office safe.

Sissy got rid of him that evening by being difficult, while
letting him assume that the conquest of her would not take more
than three or four more days. She cried furiously after he had
gone--in the comforting presence of Mrs. Candy, who first put
away a butcher knife with which, Sissy suspected, she had been
standing ready all evening.

Next morning Sissy drove to Hanover and shamelessly tattled to
Francis Tasbrough about the interesting documents Shad had in his
safe. She did not ever see Shad Ledue again.

She was very sick about his being killed. She was very sick
about all killing. She found no heroism but only barbaric
bestiality in having to kill so that one might so far live as to
be halfway honest and kind and secure. But she knew that she
would be willing to do it again.

The Jessup house was magniloquently rented by that noble
Roman, that political belch, Ex-Governor Isham Hubbard, who,
being tired of again trying to make a living by peddling real
estate and criminal law, was pleased to accept the appointment as
successor to Shad Ledue.

Sissy hastened to Beecher Falls and to Lorinda Pike.

Father Perefixe took charge of the N.U. cell, merely saying,
as he had said daily since Buzz Windrip had been inaugurated,
that he was fed-up with the whole business and was immediately
going back to Canada. In fact, on his desk he had a Canadian
time-table.

It was now two years old.

Sissy was in too snappish a state to stand being mothered,
being fattened and sobbed over and brightly sent to bed. Mrs.
Candy had done only too much of that. And Philip had given her
all the parental advice she could endure for a while. It was a
relief when Lorinda received her as an adult, as one too sensible
to insult by pity--received her, in fact, with as much respect as
if she were an enemy and not a friend.

After dinner, in Lorinda's new tea room, in an aged house
which was now empty of guests for the winter except for the
constant infestation of whimpering refugees, Lorinda, knitting,
made her first mention of the dead Mary.

"I suppose your sister did intend to kill Swan, eh?"

"I don't know. The Corpos didn't seem to think so. They gave
her a big military funeral."

"Well, of course, they don't much care to have assassinations
talked about and maybe sort of become a general habit. I agree
with your father. I think that, in many cases, assassinations are
really rather unfortunate--a mistake in tactics. No. Not good.
Oh, by the way, Sissy, I think I'm going to get your father out
of concentration camp."

"What?"

Lorinda had none of the matrimonial moans of Emma; she was as
business-like as ordering eggs.

"Yes. I tried everything. I went to see Tasbrough, and that
educational fellow, Peaseley. Nothing doing. They want to keep
Doremus in. But that rat, Aras Dilley, is at Trianon as guard
now. I'm bribing him to help your father escape. We'll have the
man here for Christmas, only kind of late, and sneak him into
Canada."

"Oh!" said Sissy.

A few days afterward, reading a coded New Underground telegram
which apparently dealt with the delivery of furniture, Lorinda
shrieked, "Sissy! All you-know-what has busted loose! In
Washington! Lee Sarason has deposed Buzz Windrip and grabbed the
dictatorship!"

"Oh!" said Sissy.

35

In his two years of dictatorship, Berzelius Windrip daily
became more a miser of power. He continued to tell himself that
his main ambition was to make all citizens healthy, in purse and
mind, and that if he was brutal it was only toward fools and
reactionaries who wanted the old clumsy systems. But after
eighteen months of Presidency he was angry that Mexico and Canada
and South America (obviously his own property, by manifest
destiny) should curtly answer his curt diplomatic notes and show
no helpfulness about becoming part of his inevitable empire.

And daily he wanted louder, more convincing Yeses from
everybody about him. How could he carry on his heartbreaking
labor if nobody ever encouraged him? he demanded. Anyone, from
Sarason to inter-office messenger, who did not play valet to his
ego he suspected of plotting against him. He constantly increased
his bodyguard, and as constantly distrusted all his guards and
discharged them, and once took a shot at a couple of them, so
that in all the world he had no companion save his old aide Lee
Sarason, and perhaps Hector Macgoblin, to whom he could talk
easily.

He felt lonely in the hours when he wanted to shuck off the
duties of despotism along with his shoes and his fine new coat.
He no longer went out racketing. His cabinet begged him not to
clown in barrooms and lodge entertainments; it was not dignified,
and it was dangerous to be too near to strangers.

So he played poker with his bodyguard, late at night, and at
such times drank too much, and he cursed them and glared with
bulging eyes whenever he lost, which, for all the good-will of
his guards about letting him win, had to be often, because he
pinched their salaries badly and locked up the spoons. He had
become as unbouncing and unbuzzing a Buzz as might be, and he did
not know it.

All the while he loved the People just as much as he feared
and detested Persons, and he planned to do something historic.
Certainly! He would give each family that five thousand dollars a
year just as soon now as he could arrange it.

And Lee Sarason, forever making his careful lists, as patient
at his desk as he was pleasure-hungry on the couch at midnight
parties, was beguiling officials to consider him their real lord
and the master of Corpoism. He kept his promises to them, while
Windrip always forgot. His office door became the door of
ambition. In Washington, the reporters privily spoke of this
assistant secretary and that general as "Sarason men." His clique
was not a government within a government; it was the government
itself, minus the megaphones. He had the Secretary of
Corporations (a former vice-president of the American Federation
of Labor) coming to him secretly every evening, to report on
labor politics and in especial on such proletarian leaders as
were dissatisfied with Windrip as Chief--i.e., with their own
share in the swag. He had from the Secretary of the Treasury
(though this functionary, one Webster Skittle, was not a
lieutenant of Sarason but merely friendly) confidential reports
on the affairs of those large employers who, since under Corpoism
it was usually possible for a millionaire to persuade the judges
in the labor-arbitration courts to look at things reasonably,
rejoiced that with strikes outlawed and employers regarded as
state officials, they would now be in secure power forever.

Sarason knew the quiet ways in which these reinforced
industrial barons used arrests by the M.M.'s to get rid of
"trouble-makers," particularly of Jewish radicals--a Jewish
radical being a Jew with nobody working for him. (Some of the
barons were themselves Jews; it is not to be expected that
race-loyalty should be carried so insanely far as to weaken the
pocketbook.)

The allegiance of all such Negroes as had the sense to be
content with safety and good pay instead of ridiculous yearnings
for personal integrity Sarason got by being photographed shaking
hands with the celebrated Negro Fundamentalist clergyman, the
Reverend Dr. Alexander Nibbs, and through the highly publicized
Sarason Prizes for the Negroes with the largest families, the
fastest time in floor-scrubbing, and the longest periods of work
without taking a vacation.

"No danger of our good friends, the Negroes, turning Red when
they're encouraged like that," Sarason announced to the
newspapers.

It was a satisfaction to Sarason that in Germany, all military
bands were now playing his national song, "Buzz and Buzz" along
with the Horst Wessel hymn, for, though he had not exactly
written the music as well as the words, the music was now being
attributed to him abroad.

As a bank clerk might, quite rationally, worry equally over
the whereabouts of a hundred million dollars' worth of the bank's
bonds, and of ten cents of his own lunch money, so Buzz Windrip
worried equally over the welfare--that is, the obedience to
himself--of a hundred and thirty-odd million American citizens
and the small matter of the moods of Lee Sarason, whose approval
of him was the one real fame. (His wife Windrip did not see
oftener than once a week, and anyway, what that rustic wench
thought was unimportant.)

The diabolic Hector Macgoblin frightened him; Secretary of War
Luthorne and Vice-President Perley Beecroft he liked well enough,
but they bored him; they smacked too much of his own small-town
boyhood, to escape which he was willing to take the
responsibilities of a nation. It was the incalculable Lee Sarason
on whom he depended, and the Lee with whom he had gone fishing
and boozing and once, even, murdering, who had seemed his own
self made more sure and articulate, had thoughts now which he
could not penetrate. Lee's smile was a veil, not a
revelation.

It was to discipline Lee, with the hope of bringing him back,
that when Buzz replaced the amiable but clumsy Colonel Luthorne
as Secretary of War by Colonel Dewey Haik, Commissioner of the
Northeastern Province (Buzz's characteristic comment was that
Luthorne was not "pulling his weight"), he also gave to Haik the
position of High Marshal of the M.M.'s, which Lee had held along
with a dozen other offices. From Lee he expected an explosion,
then repentance and a new friendship. But Lee only said, "Very
well, if you wish," and said it coldly.

Just how could he get Lee to be a good boy and come
play with him again? wistfully wondered the man who now and then
planned to be emperor of the world.

He gave Lee a thousand-dollar television set. Even more coldly
did Lee thank him, and never spoke afterward of how well he might
be receiving the still shaky television broadcasts on his
beautiful new set.

As Dewey Haik took hold, doubling efficiency in both the
regular army and the Minute Men (he was a demon for all-night
practice marches in heavy order, and the files could not
complain, because he set the example), Buzz began to wonder
whether Haik might not be his new confidant. . . . He really
would hate to throw Lee into prison, but still, Lee was so
thoughtless about hurting his feelings, when he'd gone and done
so much for him and all!

Buzz was confused. He was the more confused when Perley
Beecroft came in and briefly said that he was sick of all this
bloodshed and was going home to the farm, and as for his lofty
Vice-Presidential office, Buzz knew what he could do with it.

Were these vast national dissensions no different from
squabbles in his father's drugstore? fretted Buzz. He couldn't
very well have Beecroft shot: it might cause criticism. But it
was indecent, it was sacrilegious to annoy an emperor, and in his
irritation he had an ex-Senator and twelve workmen who were in
concentration camps taken out and shot on the charge that they
had told irreverent stories about him.

Secretary of State Sarason was saying good-night to President
Windrip in the hotel suite where Windrip really lived.

No newspaper had dared mention it, but Buzz was both bothered
by the stateliness of the White House and frightened by the
number of Reds and cranks and anti-Corpos who, with the most
commendable patience and ingenuity, tried to sneak into that
historic mansion and murder him. Buzz merely left his wife there,
for show, and, except at great receptions, never entered any part
of the White House save the office annex.

He liked this hotel suite; he was a sensible man, who
preferred straight bourbon, codfish cakes, and deep leather
chairs to Burgundy, trout bleu, and Louis Quinze. In this
twelve-room apartment, occupying the entire tenth floor of a
small unnotorious hotel, he had for himself only a plain bedroom,
a huge living room which looked like a combination of office and
hotel lobby, a large liquor closet, another closet with
thirty-seven suits of clothes, and a bathroom with jars and jars
of the pine-flavored bath salts which were his only cosmetic
luxury. Buzz might come home in a suit dazzling as a horse
blanket, one considered in Alfalfa Center a triumph of London
tailoring, but, once safe, he liked to put on his red morocco
slippers that were down at the heel and display his red
suspenders and baby-blue sleeve garters. To feel correct in those
decorations, he preferred the hotel atmosphere that, for so many
years before he had ever seen the White House, had been as
familiar to him as his ancestral corn cribs and Main Streets.

The other ten rooms of the suite, entirely shutting his own
off from the corridors and elevators, were filled night and day
with guards. To get through to Buzz in this intimate place of his
own was very much like visiting a police station for the purpose
of seeing a homicidal prisoner.

"Haik seems to me to be doing a fine job in the War
Department, Lee," said the President. "Of course you know if you
ever want the job of High Marshal back--"

"I'm quite satisfied," said the great Secretary of State.

"What do you think of having Colonel Luthorne back to help
Haik out? He's pretty good on fool details."

Sarason looked as nearly embarrassed as the self-satisfied Lee
Sarason ever could look.

"Why, uh--I supposed you knew it. Luthorne was liquidated in
the purge ten days ago."

"Good God! Luthorne killed? Why didn't I know it?"

"It was thought better to keep it quiet. He was a pretty
popular man. But dangerous. Always talking about Abraham
Lincoln!"

"So I just never know anything about what's going on! Why,
even the newspaper clippings are predigested, by God, before I
see 'em!"

"It's thought better not to bother you with minor details,
boss. You know that! Of course, if you feel I haven't organized
your staff correctly--"

"Aw now, don't fly off the handle, Lee! I just meant--Of
course I know how hard you've tried to protect me so I could give
all my brains to the higher problems of State. But Luthorne--I
kind of liked him. He always had quite a funny line when we
played poker." Buzz Windrip felt lonely, as once a certain Shad
Ledue had felt, in a hotel suite that differed from Buzz's only
in being smaller. To forget it he bawled, very brightly, "Lee, do
you ever wonder what'll happen in the future?"

"Why, I think you and I may have mentioned it."

"But golly, just think of what might happen in the future,
Lee! Think of it! Why, we may be able to pull off a North
American kingdom!" Buzz half meant it seriously--or perhaps
quarter meant it. "How'd you like to be Duke of Georgia--or Grand
Duke, or whatever they call a Grand Exalted Ruler of the Elks in
this peerage business? And then how about an Empire of North and
South America after that? I might make you a king under me,
then--say something like King of Mexico. Howjuh like that?"

"Be very amusing," said Lee mechanically--as Lee always did
say the same thing mechanically whenever Buzz repeated this same
nonsense.

"But you got to stick by me and not forget all I've done for
you, Lee, don't forget that."

"I never forget anything! . . . By the way, we ought to
liquidate, or at least imprison, Perley Beecroft, too. He's still
technically Vice-President of the United States, and if the lousy
traitor managed some skullduggery so as to get you killed or
deposed, he might be regarded by some narrow-minded literalists
as President!"

"All right. You're the boss. G'night," said Lee, and returned
from this plumber's dream of paradise to his own gold-and-black
and apricot-silk bower in Georgetown, which he shared with
several handsome young M.M. officers. They were savage soldiers,
yet apt at music and at poetry. With them, he was not in the
least passionless, as he seemed now to Buzz Windrip. He was
either angry with his young friends, and then he whipped them, or
he was in a paroxysm of apology to them, and caressed their
wounds. Newspapermen who had once seemed to be his friends said
that he had traded the green eyeshade for a wreath of
violets.

At cabinet meeting, late in 1938, Secretary of State Sarason
revealed to the heads of the government disturbing news.
Vice-President Beecroft--and had he not told them the man should
have been shot?--had fled to Canada, renounced Corpoism, and
joined Walt Trowbridge in plotting. There were bubbles from an
almost boiling rebellion in the Middle West and Northwest,
especially in Minnesota and the Dakotas, where agitators, some of
them formerly of political influence, were demanding that their
states secede from the Corpo Union and form a cooperative (indeed
almost Socialistic) commonwealth of their own.

"Rats! Just a lot of irresponsible wind bags!" jeered
President Windrip. "Why! I thought you were supposed to be the
camera-eyed gink that kept up on everything that goes on, Lee!
You forget that I myself, personally, made a special radio
address to that particular section of the country last week! And
I got a wonderful reaction. The Middle Westerners are absolutely
loyal to me. They appreciate what I've been trying to do!"

Not answering him at all, Sarason demanded that, in order to
bring and hold all elements in the country together by that
useful Patriotism which always appears upon threat of an outside
attack, the government immediately arrange to be insulted and
menaced in a well-planned series of deplorable "incidents" on the
Mexican border, and declare war on Mexico as soon as America
showed that it was getting hot and patriotic enough.

Secretary of the Treasury Skittle and Attorney General
Porkwood shook their heads, but Secretary of War Haik and
Secretary of Education Macgoblin agreed with Sarason
high-mindedly. Once, pointed out the learned Macgoblin,
governments had merely let themselves slide into a war, thanking
Providence for having provided a conflict as a febrifuge against
internal discontent, but of course, in this age of deliberate,
planned propaganda, a really modern government like theirs must
figure out what brand of war they had to sell and plan the
selling-campaign consciously. Now, as for him, he would be
willing to leave the whole set-up to the advertising genius of
Brother Sarason.

"No, no, no!" cried Windrip. "We're not ready for a war! Of
course, we'll take Mexico some day. It's our destiny to control
it and Christianize it. But I'm scared that your darn scheme
might work just opposite to what you say. You put arms into the
hands of too many irresponsible folks, and they might use 'em and
turn against you and start a revolution and throw the whole dern
gang of us out! No, no! I've often wondered if the whole Minute
Men business, with their arms and training, may not be a mistake.
That was your idea, Lee, not mine!"

Sarason spoke evenly: "My dear Buzz, one day you thank me for
originating that 'great crusade of citizen soldiers defending
their homes'--as you love to call it on the radio--and the next
day you almost ruin your clothes, you're so scared of them. Make
up your mind one way or the other!"

Sarason walked out of the room, not bowing.

Windrip complained, "I'm not going to stand for Lee's talking
to me like that! Why, the dirty double-crosser, I made him! One
of these days, he'll find a new secretary of state around this
joint! I s'pose he thinks jobs like that grow on every tree!
Maybe he'd like to be a bank president or something--I mean,
maybe he'd like to be Emperor of England!"

President Windrip, in his hotel bedroom, was awakened late at
night by the voice of a guard in the outer room: "Yuh, sure, let
him pass--he's the Secretary of State." Nervously the President
clicked on his bedside lamp. . . . He had needed it lately, to
read himself to sleep.

In that limited glow he saw Lee Sarason, Dewey Haik, and Dr.
Hector Macgoblin march to the side of his bed. Lee's thin sharp
face was like flour. His deep-buried eyes were those of a
sleepwalker. His skinny right hand held a bowie knife which, as
his hand deliberately rose, was lost in the dimness. Windrip
swiftly thought: Sure would be hard to know where to buy a
dagger, in Washington; and Windrip thought: All this is the
doggonedest foolishness--just like a movie or one of these old
history books when you were a kid; and Windrip thought, all in
that same flash: Good God, I'm going to be killed!

He cried out, "Lee! You couldn't do that to me!"

Lee grunted, like one who has detected a bad smell.

Then the Berzelius Windrip who could, incredibly, become
President really awoke: "Lee! Do you remember the time when your
old mother was so sick, and I gave you my last cent and loaned
you my flivver so you could go see her, and I hitch-hiked to my
next meeting? Lee!"

"Hell. I suppose so. General."

"Yes?" answered Dewey Haik, not very pleasantly.

"I think we'll stick him on a destroyer or something and let
him sneak off to France or England. . . . The lousy coward seems
afraid to die. . . . Of course, we'll kill him if he ever does
dare to come back to the States. Take him out and phone the
Secretary of the Navy for a boat and get him on it, will
you?"

"Very well, sir," said Haik, even less pleasantly.

It had been easy. The troops, who obeyed Haik, as Secretary of
War, had occupied all of Washington.

Ten days later Buzz Windrip was landed in Havre and went
sighingly to Paris. It was his first view of Europe except for
one twenty-one-day Cook's Tour. He was profoundly homesick for
Chesterfield cigarettes, flapjacks, Moon Mullins, and the sound
of some real human being saying "Yuh, what's bitin' you?" instead
of this perpetual sappy "oui?"

In Paris he remained, though he became the sort of minor hero
of tragedy, like the ex-King of Greece, Kerensky, the Russian
Grand Dukes, Jimmy Walker, and a few ex-presidents from South
America and Cuba, who is delighted to accept invitations to
drawing rooms where the champagne is good enough and one may have
a chance of finding people, now and then, who will listen to
one's story and say "sir."

At that, though, Buzz chuckled, he had kinda put it over on
those crooks, for during his two sweet years of despotism he had
sent four million dollars abroad, to secret, safe accounts. And
so Buzz Windrip passed into wabbly paragraphs in recollections by
ex-diplomatic gentlemen with monocles. In what remained of
Ex-President Windrip's life, everything was ex. He was
even so far forgotten that only four or five American students
tried to shoot him.

The more dulcetly they had once advised and flattered Buzz,
the more ardently did most of his former followers, Macgoblin and
Senator Porkwood and Dr. Almeric Trout and the rest, turn in loud
allegiance to the new President, the Hon. Lee Sarason.

He issued a proclamation that he had discovered that Windrip
had been embezzling the people's money and plotting with Mexico
to avoid war with that guilty country; and that he, Sarason, in
quite alarming grief and reluctance, since he more than anyone
else had been deceived by his supposed friend, Windrip, had
yielded to the urging of the Cabinet and taken over the
Presidency, instead of Vice-President Beecroft, the exiled
traitor.

President Sarason immediately began appointing the fancier of
his young officer friends to the most responsible offices in
State and army. It amused him, seemingly, to shock people by
making a pink-cheeked, moist-eyed boy of twenty-five Commissioner
of the Federal District, which included Washington and Maryland.
Was he not supreme, was he not semi-divine, like a Roman emperor?
Could he not defy all the muddy mob that he (once a Socialist)
had, for its weak shiftlessness, come to despise?

"Would that the American people had just one neck!" he
plagiarized, among his laughing boys.

In the decorous White House of Coolidge and Harrison and
Rutherford Birchard Hayes he had orgies (an old name for
"parties") with weaving limbs and garlands and wine in pretty
fair imitations of Roman beakers.

It was hard for imprisoned men like Doremus Jessup to believe
it, but there were some tens of thousands of Corpos, in the
M.M.'s, in civil service, in the army, and just in private ways,
to whom Sarason's flippant régime was tragic.

They were the Idealists of Corpoism, and there were plenty of
them, along with the bullies and swindlers; they were the men and
women who, in 1935 and 1936, had turned to Windrip & Co., not
as perfect, but as the most probable saviors of the country from,
on one hand, domination by Moscow and, on the other hand, the
slack indolence, the lack of decent pride of half the American
youth, whose world (these idealists asserted) was composed of
shiftless distaste for work and refusal to learn anything
thoroughly, of blatting dance music on the radio, maniac
automobiles, slobbering sexuality, the humor and art of comic
strips--of a slave psychology which was making America a land for
sterner men to loot.

General Emmanuel Coon was one of the Corpo Idealists.

Such men did not condone the murders under the Corpo
régime. But they insisted, "This is a revolution, and
after all, when in all history has there been a revolution with
so little bloodshed?"

They were aroused by the pageantry of Corpoism: enormous
demonstrations, with the red-and-black flags a flaunting
magnificence like storm clouds. They were proud of new Corpo
roads, hospitals, television stations, aeroplane lines; they were
touched by processions of the Corpo Youth, whose faces were
exalted with pride in the myths of Corpo heroism and clean
Spartan strength and the semi-divinity of the all-protecting
Father, President Windrip. They believed, they made themselves
believe, that in Windrip had come alive again the virtues of Andy
Jackson and Farragut and Jeb Stuart, in place of the mob
cheapness of the professional athletes who had been the only
heroes of 1935.

They planned, these idealists, to correct, as quickly as might
be, the errors of brutality and crookedness among officials. They
saw arising a Corpo art, a Corpo learning, profound and real,
divested of the traditional snobbishness of the old-time
universities, valiant with youth, and only the more beautiful in
that it was "useful." They were convinced that Corpoism was
Communism cleansed of foreign domination and the violence and
indignity of mob dictatorship; Monarchism with the chosen hero of
the people for monarch; Fascism without grasping and selfish
leaders; freedom with order and discipline; Traditional America
without its waste and provincial cockiness.

Like all religious zealots, they had blessed capacity for
blindness, and they were presently convinced that (since the only
newspapers they ever read certainly said nothing about it) there
were no more of blood-smeared cruelties in court and
concentration camp; no restrictions of speech or thought. They
believed that they never criticized the Corpo régime not
because they were censored, but because "that sort of thing was,
like obscenity, such awfully bad form."

And these idealists were as shocked and bewildered by
Sarason's coup d'état against Windrip as was Mr. Berzelius
Windrip himself.

The grim Secretary of War, Haik, scolded at President Sarason
for his influence on the nation, particularly on the troops. Lee
laughed at him, but once he was sufficiently flattered by Haik's
tribute to his artistic powers to write a poem for him. It was a
poem which was later to be sung by millions; it was, in fact, the
most popular of the soldiers' ballads which were to spring
automatically from anonymous soldier bards during the war between
the United States and Mexico. Only, being as pious a believer in
Modern Advertising as Sarason himself, the efficient Haik wanted
to encourage the spontaneous generation of these patriotic folk
ballads by providing the automatic springing and the anonymous
bard. He had as much foresight, as much "prophetic engineering,"
as a motorcar manufacturer.

Sarason was as eager for war with Mexico (or Ethiopia or Siam
or Greenland or any other country that would provide his pet
young painters with a chance to portray Sarason being heroic amid
curious vegetation) as Haik; not only to give malcontents
something outside the country to be cross about, but also to give
himself a chance to be picturesque. He answered Haik's request by
writing a rollicking military chorus at a time while the country
was still theoretically entirely friendly with Mexico. It went to
the tune of "Mademoiselle from Armentières"--or
"Armenteers." If the Spanish in it was a little shaky, still,
millions were later to understand that "Habla oo?" stood for
"¿Habla usted?" signifying "Parlez-vous?" It ran thus, as
it came from Sarason's purple but smoking typewriter:

Señorita from Mazatlán, Once we've met,You'll smile all over your khaki pan, You wont forget!For days you'll holler, "Oh, what a man!"And you'll never marry a Mexican. Hinky, dinky, habla oo?

If at times President Sarason seemed flippant, he was not at
all so during his part in the scientific preparation for war
which consisted in rehearsing M.M. choruses in trolling out this
ditty with well-trained spontaneity.

His friend Hector Macgoblin, now Secretary of State, told
Sarason that this manly chorus was one of his greatest creations.
Macgoblin, though personally he did not join in Sarason's
somewhat unusual midnight diversions, was amused by them, and he
often told Sarason that he was the only original creative genius
among this whole bunch of stuffed shirts, including Haik.

"You want to watch that cuss Haik, Lee," said Macgoblin. "He's
ambitious, he's a gorilla, and he's a pious Puritan, and that's a
triple combination I'm scared of. The troops like him."

"Rats! He has no attraction for them. He's just an accurate
military bookkeeper," said Sarason.

That night he had a party at which, for a novelty, rather
shocking to his intimates, he actually had girls present,
performing certain curious dances. The next morning Haik rebuked
him, and--Sarason had a hangover--was stormed at. That night,
just a month after Sarason had usurped the Presidency, Haik
struck.

There was no melodramatic dagger-and-uplifted-arm business
about it, this time--though Haik did traditionally come late, for
all Fascists, like all drunkards, seem to function most
vigorously at night. Haik marched into the White House with his
picked storm troops, found President Sarason in violet silk
pajamas among his friends, shot Sarason and most of his
companions dead, and proclaimed himself President.

Hector Macgoblin fled by aeroplane to Cuba, then on. When last
seen, he was living high up in the mountains of Haiti, wearing
only a singlet, dirty white-drill trousers, grass sandals, and a
long tan beard; very healthy and happy, occupying a one-room hut
with a lovely native girl, practicing modern medicine and
studying ancient voodoo.

When Dewey Haik became President, then America really did
begin to suffer a little, and to long for the good old
democratic, liberal days of Windrip.

Windrip and Sarason had not minded mirth and dancing in the
street so long as they could be suitably taxed. Haik disliked
such things on principle. Except, perhaps, that he was an atheist
in theology, he was a strict orthodox Christian. He was the first
to tell the populace that they were not going to get any five
thousand dollars a year but, instead, "reap the profits of
Discipline and of the Scientific Totalitarian State not in mere
paper figures but in vast dividends of Pride, Patriotism, and
Power." He kicked out of the army all officers who could not
endure marching and going thirsty; and out of the civil branch
all commissioners--including one Francis Tasbrough--who had
garnered riches too easily and too obviously.

He treated the entire nation like a well-run plantation, on
which the slaves were better fed than formerly, less often
cheated by their overseers, and kept so busy that they had time
only for work and for sleep, and thus fell rarely into the
debilitating vices of laughter, song (except war songs against
Mexico), complaint, or thinking. Under Haik there were less
floggings in M.M. posts and in concentration camps, for by his
direction officers were not to waste time in the sport of beating
persons, men, women, or children, who asserted that they didn't
care to be slaves on even the best plantation, but just to shoot
them out of hand.

Haik made such use of the clergy--Protestant, Catholic,
Jewish, and Liberal-Agnostic--as Windrip and Sarason never had.
While there were plenty of ministers who, like Mr. Falck and
Father Stephen Perefixe, like Cardinal Faulhaber and Pastor
Niemoeller in Germany, considered it some part of Christian duty
to resent the enslavement and torture of their appointed flocks,
there were also plenty of reverend celebrities, particularly
large-city pastors whose sermons were reported in the newspapers
every Monday morning, to whom Corpoism had given a chance to be
noisily and lucratively patriotic. These were the
chaplains-at-heart, who, if there was no war in which they could
humbly help to purify and comfort the poor brave boys who were
fighting, were glad to help provide such a war.

These more practical shepherds, since like doctors and lawyers
they were able to steal secrets out of the heart, became valued
spies during the difficult months after February, 1939, when Haik
was working up war with Mexico. (Canada? Japan? Russia? They
would come later.) For even with an army of slaves, it was
necessary to persuade them that they were freemen and fighters
for the principle of freedom, or otherwise the scoundrels might
cross over and join the enemy!

So reigned the good king Haik, and if there was anyone in all
the land who was discontented, you never heard him speak--not
twice.

And in the White House, where under Sarason shameless youths
had danced, under the new reign of righteousness and the
blackjack, Mrs. Haik, a lady with eyeglasses and a smile of
resolute cordiality, gave to the W.C.T.U., the Y.W.C.A., and the
Ladies' League against Red Radicalism, and their inherently
incidental husbands, a magnified and hand-colored Washington
version of just such parties as she had once given in the Haik
bungalow in Eglantine, Oregon.

36

The ban on information at the Trianon camp had been raised;
Mrs. Candy had come calling on Doremus--complete with cocoanut
layer cake--and he had heard of Mary's death, the departure of
Emma and Sissy, the end of Windrip and Sarason. And none of it
seemed in the least real--not half so real and, except for the
fact that he would never see Mary again, not half so important as
the increasing number of lice and rats in their cell.

During the ban, they had celebrated Christmas by laughing, not
very cheerfully, at the Christmas tree Karl Pascal had contrived
out of a spruce bough and tinfoil from cigarette packages. They
had hummed "Stille Nacht" softly in the darkness, and Doremus had
thought of all their comrades in political prisons in America,
Europe, Japan, India.

But Karl, apparently, thought of comrades only if they were
saved, baptized Communists. And, forced together as they were in
a cell, the growing bitterness and orthodox piety of Karl became
one of Doremus's most hateful woes; a tragedy to be blamed upon
the Corpos, or upon the principle of dictatorship in general, as
savagely as the deaths of Mary and Dan Wilgus and Henry Veeder.
Under persecution, Karl lost no ounce of his courage and his
ingenuity in bamboozling the M.M. guards, but day by day he did
steadily lose all his humor, his patience, his tolerance, his
easy companionship, and everything else that made life endurable
to men packed in a cell. The Communism that had always been his
King Charles's Head, sometimes amusing, became a religious
bigotry as hateful to Doremus as the old bigotries of the
Inquisition or the Fundamentalist Protestants; that attitude of
slaughtering to save men's souls from which the Jessup family had
escaped during these last three generations.

It was impossible to get away from Karl's increasing zeal. He
chattered on at night for an hour after all the other five had
growled, "Oh, shut up! I want to sleep! You'll be making a Corpo
out of me!"

Sometimes, in his proselytizing, he conquered. When his cell
mates had long enough cursed the camp guards, Karl would rebuke
them: "You're a lot too simple when you explain everything by
saying that the Corpos, especially the M.M.'s, are all fiends.
Plenty of 'em are. But even the worst of 'em, even the
professional gunmen in the M.M. ranks, don't get as much
satisfaction out of punishing us heretics as the honest, dumb
Corpos who've been misled by their leaders' mouthing about
Freedom, Order, Security, Discipline, Strength! All those swell
words that even before Windrip came in the speculators started
using to protect their profits! Especially how they used the word
'Liberty'! Liberty to steal the didies off the babies! I tell
you, an honest man gets sick when he hears the word 'Liberty'
today, after what the Republicans did to it! And I tell you that
a lot of the M.M. guards right here at Trianon are just as
unfortunate as we are--lot of 'em are just poor devils that
couldn't get decent work, back in the Golden Age of Frank
Roosevelt--bookkeepers that had to dig ditches, auto agents that
couldn't sell cars and went sour, ex-looeys in the Great War that
came back to find their jobs pinched off 'em and that followed
Windrip, quite honestly, because they thought, the saps, that
when he said Security he meant Security! They'll
learn!"

And having admirably discoursed for another hour on the perils
of self-righteousness among the Corpos, Comrade Pascal would
change the subject and discourse upon the glory of
self-righteousness among the Communists--particularly upon those
sanctified examples of Communism who lived in bliss in the Holy
City of Moscow, where, Doremus judged, the streets were paved
with undepreciable roubles.

The Holy City of Moscow! Karl looked upon it with exactly such
uncritical and slightly hysterical adoration as other sectarians
had in their day devoted to Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome, Canterbury,
and Benares. Fine, all right, thought Doremus. Let 'em worship
their sacred fonts--it was as good a game as any for the mentally
retarded. Only, why then should they object to his considering as
sacred Fort Beulah, or New York, or Oklahoma City?

Karl once fell into a froth because Doremus wondered if the
iron deposits in Russia were all they might be. Why certainly!
Russia, being Holy Russia, must, as a useful part of its
holiness, have sufficient iron, and Karl needed no mineralogists'
reports but only the blissful eye of faith to know it.

He did not mind Karl's worshiping Holy Russia. But Karl did,
using the word "naïve," which is the favorite word and just
possibly the only word known to Communist journalists, derisively
mind when Doremus had a mild notion of worshiping Holy America.
Karl spoke often of photographs in the Moscow News of
nearly naked girls on Russian bathing-beaches as proving the
triumph and joy of the workers under Bolshevism, but he regarded
precisely the same sort of photographs of nearly naked girls on
Long Island bathing-beaches as proving the degeneration of the
workers under Capitalism.

As a newspaper man, Doremus remembered that the only reporters
who misrepresented and concealed facts more unscrupulously than
the Capitalists were the Communists.

He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of
Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry
that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism. But he saw
too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that
the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word "Fascism" and
preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of
Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they
were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose
they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson.

That Karl Pascal should be turning into a zealot, like most of
his chiefs in the Communist party, was grievous to Doremus
because he had once simple-heartedly hoped that in the mass
strength of Communism there might be an escape from cynical
dictatorship. But he saw now that he must remain alone, a
"Liberal," scorned by all the noisier prophets for refusing to be
a willing cat for the busy monkeys of either side. But at worst,
the Liberals, the Tolerant, might in the long run preserve some
of the arts of civilization, no matter which brand of tyranny
should finally dominate the world.

"More and more, as I think about history," he pondered, "I am
convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has
been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and
that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any
social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of
barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of
silencing them forever."

Yes, this was the worst thing the enemies of honor, the pirate
industrialists and then their suitable successors, the Corpos
with their blackjacks, had done: it had turned the brave, the
generous, the passionate and half-literate Karl Pascals into
dangerous fanatics. And how well they had done it! Doremus was
uncomfortable with Karl; he felt that his next turn in jail might
be under the wardenship of none other than Karl himself, as he
remembered how the Bolsheviks, once in power, had most smugly
imprisoned and persecuted those great women, Spiridinova and
Breshkovskaya and Ismailovitch, who, by their conspiracies
against the Czar, their willingness to endure Siberian torture on
behalf of "freedom for the masses," had most brought on the
revolution by which the Bolsheviks were able to take control--and
not only again forbid freedom to the masses, but this time inform
them that, anyway, freedom was just a damn silly bourgeois
superstition.

So Doremus, sleeping two-and-a-half feet above his old
companion, felt himself in a cell within a cell. Henry Veeder and
Clarence Little and Victor Loveland and Mr. Falck were gone now,
and to Julian, penned in solitary, he could not speak once a
month.

He yearned for escape with a desire that was near to insanity;
awake and asleep it was his obsession; and he thought his heart
had stopped when Squad-Leader Aras Dilley muttered to him, as
Doremus was scrubbing a lavatory floor, "Say! Listen, Mr. Jessup!
Mis' Pike is fixin' it up and I'm going to help you escape jus'
soon as things is right!"

It was a question of the guards on sentry-go outside the
quadrangle. As sweeper, Doremus was reasonably free to leave his
cell, and Aras had loosened the boards and barbed wire at the end
of one of the alleys leading from the quadrangle between
buildings. But outside, he was likely to be shot by a guard on
sight.

For a week Aras watched. He knew that one of the night guards
had a habit of getting drunk, which was forgiven him because of
his excellence in flogging troublemakers but which was regarded
by the more judicious as rather regrettable. And for that week
Aras fed the guard's habit on Lorinda's expense money, and was
indeed so devoted to his duties that he was himself twice carried
to bed. Snake Tizra grew interested--but Snake also, after the
first couple of drinks, liked to be democratic with his men and
to sing "The Old Spinning-Wheel."

Aras confided to Doremus: "Mis' Pike--she don't dast send you
a note, less somebody get hold of it, but she says to me to tell
you not to tell anybody you're going to take a sneak, or it'll
get out."

So on the evening when Aras jerked a head at him from the
corridor, then rasped, surly-seeming, "Here you, Jessup--you left
one of the cans all dirty!" Doremus looked mildly at the cell
that had been his home and study and tabernacle for six months,
glanced at Karl Pascal reading in his bunk--slowly waving a
shoeless foot in a sock with the end of it gone, at Truman Webb
darning the seat of his pants, noted the gray smoke in filmy
tilting layers about the small electric bulb in the ceiling, and
silently stepped out into the corridor.

The late-January night was foggy.

Aras handed him a worn M.M. overcoat, whispered, "Third alley
on right; moving-van on corner opposite the church," and was
gone.

On hands and knees Doremus briskly crawled under the loosened
barbed wire at the end of the small alley and carelessly stepped
out, along the road. The only guard in sight was at a distance,
and he was wavering in his gait. A block away, a furniture van
was jacked up while the driver and his helper painfully prepared
to change one of the tremendous tires. In the light of a corner
arc, Doremus saw that the driver was that same hard-faced
long-distance cruiser who had carried bundles of tracts for the
New Underground.

The driver grunted, "Get in--hustle!" Doremus crouched between
a bureau and a wing chair inside.

Instantly he felt the tilted body of the van dropping, as the
driver pulled out the jack, and from the seat he heard, "All
right! We're off. Crawl up behind me here and listen, Mr. Jessup.
. . . Can you hear me? . . . The M.M.'s don't take so much
trouble to prevent you gents and respectable fellows from
escaping. They figure that most of you are too scary to try out
anything, once you're away from your offices and front porches
and sedans. But I guess you may be different, some ways, Mr.
Jessup. Besides, they figure that if you do escape, they can pick
you up easy afterwards, because you ain't onto hiding out, like a
regular fellow that's been out of work sometimes and maybe gone
on the bum. But don't worry. We'll get you through. I tell you,
there's nobody got friends like a revolutionist. . . . And
enemies!"

Then first did it come to Doremus that, by sentence of the
late lamented Effingham Swan, he was subject to the death penalty
for escaping. But "Oh, what the hell!" he grunted, like Karl
Pascal, and he stretched in the luxury of mobility, in that
galloping furniture truck.

He was free! He saw the lights of villages going by!

Once, he was hidden beneath hay in a barn; again, in a spruce
grove high on a hill; and once he slept overnight on top of a
coffin in the establishment of an undertaker. He walked secret
paths; he rode in the back of an itinerant medicine-peddler's car
and, concealed in fur cap and high-collared fur coat, in the
sidecar of an Underground worker serving as an M.M. squad-leader.
From this he dismounted, at the driver's command, in front of an
obviously untenanted farmhouse on a snaky back-road between
Monadnock Mountain and the Averill lakes--a very slattern of an
old unpainted farmhouse, with sinking roof and snow up to the
frowsy windows.

It seemed a mistake.

Doremus knocked, as the motorcycle snarled away, and the door
opened on Lorinda Pike and Sissy, crying together, "Oh, my
dear!"

He could only mutter, "Well!"

When they had made him strip off his fur coat in the farmhouse
living room, a room with peeling wall paper, and altogether bare
except for a cot, two chairs, a table, the two moaning women saw
a small man, his face dirty, pasty, and sunken as by
tuberculosis, his once fussily trimmed beard and mustache ragged
as wisps of hay, his overlong hair a rustic jag at the back, his
clothes ripped and filthy--an old, sick, discouraged tramp. He
dropped on a straight chair and stared at them. Maybe they were
genuine--maybe they really were there--maybe he was, as it
seemed, in heaven, looking at the two principal angels, but he
had been so often fooled so cruelly in his visions these dreary
months! He sobbed, and they comforted him with softly stroking
hands and not too confoundedly much babble.

"I've got a hot bath for you! And I'll scrub your back! And
then some hot chicken soup and ice cream!"

As though one should say: The Lord God awaits you on His
throne and all whom you bless shall be blessed, and all your
enemies brought to their knees!

Those sainted women had actually had a long tin tub fetched to
the kitchen of the old house, filled it with water heated in
kettle and dishpan on the stove, and provided brushes, soap, a
vast sponge, and such a long caressing bath towel as Doremus had
forgotten existed. And somehow, from Fort Beulah, Sissy had
brought plenty of his own shoes and shirts and three suits that
now seemed to him fit for royalty.

He who had not had a hot bath for six months, and for three
had worn the same underclothes, and for two (in clammy winter) no
socks whatever!

If the presence of Lorinda and Sissy was token of heaven, to
slide inch by slow ecstatic inch into the tub was its proof, and
he lay soaking in glory.

When he was half dressed, the two came in, and there was about
as much thought of modesty, or need for it, as though he were the
two-year-old babe he somewhat resembled. They were laughing at
him, but laughter became sharp whimpers of horror when they saw
the gridironed meat of his back. But nothing more demanding than
"Oh, my dear!" did Lorinda say, even then.

Though Sissy had once been glad that Lorinda spared her any
mothering, Doremus rejoiced in it. Snake Tizra and the Trianon
concentration camp had been singularly devoid of any mothering.
Lorinda salved his back and powdered it. She cut his hair, not
too unskillfully. She cooked for him all the heavy, earthy dishes
of which he had dreamed, hungry in a cell: hamburg steak with
onions, corn pudding, buckwheat cakes with sausages, apple
dumplings with hard and soft sauce, and cream of mushroom
soup!

It had not been safe to take him to the comforts of her tea
room at Beecher Falls; already M.M.'s had been there, snooping
after him. But Sissy and she had, for such refugees as they might
be forwarding for the New Underground, provided this dingy
farmhouse with half-a-dozen cots, and rich stores of canned goods
and beautiful bottles (Doremus considered them) of honey and
marmalade and bar-le-duc. The actual final crossing of the border
into Canada was easier than it had been when Buck Titus had tried
to smuggle the Jessup family over. It had become a system, as in
the piratical days of bootlegging; with new forest paths, bribery
of frontier guards, and forged passports. He was safe. Yet just
to make safety safer, Lorinda and Sissy, rubbing their chins as
they looked Doremus over, still discussing him as brazenly as
though he were a baby who could not understand them, decided to
turn him into a young man.

"Dye his hair and mustache black and shave the beard, I think.
I wish we had time to give him a nice Florida tan with an Alpine
lamp, too," considered Lorinda.

"Yes, I think he'll look sweet that way," said Sissy.

"I will not have my beard off!" he protested. "How do I know
what kind of a chin I'll have when it's naked?"

"Why, the man still thinks he's a newspaper proprietor and one
of Fort Beulah's social favorites!" marveled Sissy as they
ruthlessly set to work.

"Only real reason for these damn wars and revolutions anyway
is that the womenfolks get a chance--ouch! be careful!--to be
dear little Amateur Mothers to every male they can get in their
clutches. Hair dye!" said Doremus bitterly.

But he was shamelessly proud of his youthful face when it was
denuded, and he discovered that he had a quite tolerably stubborn
chin, and Sissy was sent back to Beecher Falls to keep the tea
room alive, and for three days Lorinda and he gobbled steaks and
ale, and played pinochle, and lay talking infinitely of all they
had thought about each other in the six desert months that might
have been sixty years. He was to remember the sloping farmhouse
bedroom and a shred of rag carpet and a couple of rickety chairs
and Lorinda snuggled under the old red comforter on the cot, not
as winter poverty but as youth and adventurous love.

Then, in a forest clearing, with snow along the spruce boughs,
a few feet across into Canada, he was peering into the eyes of
his two women, curtly saying good-bye, and trudging off into the
new prison of exile from the America to which, already, he was
looking back with the long pain of nostalgia.

37

His beard had grown again--he and his beard had been friends
for many years, and he had missed it of late. His hair and
mustache had again assumed a respectable gray in place of the
purple dye that under electric lights had looked so bogus. He was
no longer impassioned at the sight of a lamb chop or a cake of
soap. But he had not yet got over the pleasure and slight
amazement at being able to talk as freely as he would, as
emphatically as might please him, and in public.

He sat with his two closest friends in Montreal, two fellow
executives in the Department of Propaganda and Publications of
the New Underground (Walt Trowbridge, General Chairman), and
these two friends were the Hon. Perley Beecroft, who presumably
was the President of the United States, and Joe Elphrey, an
ornamental young man who, as "Mr. Cailey," had been a prize agent
of the Communist Party in America till he had been kicked out of
that almost imperceptible body for having made a "united front"
with Socialists, Democrats, and even choir-singers when
organizing an anti-Corpo revolt in Texas.

Over their ale, in this café, Beecroft and Elphrey were
at it as usual: Elphrey insisting that the only "solution" of
American distress was dictatorship by the livelier
representatives of the toiling masses, strict and if need be
violent, but (this was his new heresy) not governed by Moscow.
Beecroft was gaseously asserting that "all we needed" was a
return to precisely the political parties, the drumming up of
votes, and the oratorical legislating by Congress, of the
contented days of William B. McKinley.

But as for Doremus, he leaned back not vastly caring what
nonsense the others might talk so long as it was permitted them
to talk at all without finding that the waiters were M.M. spies;
and content to know that, whatever happened, Trowbridge and the
other authentic leaders would never go back to satisfaction in
government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits. He
thought comfortably of the fact that just yesterday (he had this
from the chairman's secretary), Walt Trowbridge had dismissed
Wilson J. Shale, the ducal oil man, who had come, apparently with
sincerity, to offer his fortune and his executive experience to
Trowbridge and the cause.

"Nope. Sorry, Will. But we can't use you. Whatever
happens--even if Haik marches over and slaughters all of us along
with all our Canadian hosts--you and your kind of clever pirates
are finished. Whatever happens, whatever details of a new system
of government may be decided on, whether we call it a
'Cooperative Commonwealth' or 'State Socialism' or 'Communism' or
'Revived Traditional Democracy,' there's got to be a new
feeling--that government is not a game for a few smart, resolute
athletes like you, Will, but a universal partnership, in which
the State must own all resources so large that they affect all
members of the State, and in which the one worst crime won't be
murder or kidnaping but taking advantage of the State--in which
the seller of fraudulent medicine, or the liar in Congress, will
be punished a whole lot worse than the fellow who takes an ax to
the man who's grabbed off his girl. . . . Eh? What's going to
happen to magnates like you, Will? God knows! What happened to
the dinosaurs?"

So was Doremus in his service well content.

Yet socially he was almost as lonely as in his cell at
Trianon; almost as savagely he longed for the not exorbitant
pleasure of being with Lorinda, Buck, Emma, Sissy, Steve
Perefixe.

None of them save Emma could join him in Canada, and she would
not. Her letters suggested fear of the un-Worcesterian
wildernesses of Montreal. She wrote that Philip and she hoped
they might be able to get Doremus forgiven by the Corpos! So he
was left to associate only with his fellow refugees from
Corpoism, and he knew a life that had been familiar, far too
familiar, to political exiles ever since the first revolt in
Egypt sent the rebels sneaking off into Assyria.

It was no particularly indecent egotism in Doremus that made
him suppose, when he arrived in Canada, that everyone would
thrill to his tale of imprisonment, torture, and escape. But he
found that ten thousand spirited tellers of woe had come there
before him, and that the Canadians, however attentive and
generous hosts they might be, were actively sick of pumping up
new sympathy. They felt that their quota of martyrs was
completely filled, and as to the exiles who came in penniless,
and that was a majority of them, the Canadians became distinctly
weary of depriving their own families on behalf of unknown
refugees, and they couldn't even keep up forever a gratification
in the presence of celebrated American authors, politicians,
scientists, when they became common as mosquitoes.

It was doubtful if a lecture on Deplorable Conditions in
America by Herbert Hoover and General Pershing together would
have attracted forty people. Ex-governors and judges were glad to
get jobs washing dishes, and ex-managing-editors were hoeing
turnips. And reports said that Mexico and London and France were
growing alike apologetically bored.

So Doremus, meagerly living on his twenty-dollar-a-week salary
from the N.U., met no one save his own fellow exiles, in just
such salons of unfortunate political escapists as the White
Russians, the Red Spaniards, the Blue Bulgarians, and all the
other polychromatic insurrectionists frequented in Paris. They
crowded together, twenty of them in a parlor twelve by twelve,
very like the concentration-camp cells in area, inhabitants, and
eventual smell, from 8 P.M. till midnight, and made up for lack
of dinner with coffee and doughnuts and exiguous sandwiches, and
talked without cessation about the Corpos. They told as "actual
facts" stories about President Haik which had formerly been
applied to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini--the one about the man
who was alarmed to find he had saved Haik from drowning and
begged him not to tell.

In the cafés they seized the newspapers from home. Men
who had had an eye gouged out on behalf of freedom, with the
rheumy remaining one peered to see who had won the Missouri
Avenue Bridge Club Prize.

They were brave and romantic, tragic and distinguished, and
Doremus became a little sick of them all and of the final
brutality of fact that no normal man can very long endure
another's tragedy, and that friendly weeping will some day turn
to irritated kicking.

He was stirred when, in a hastily built American
interdenominational chapel, he heard a starveling who had once
been a pompous bishop read from the pine pulpit:

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept,
when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in
the midst thereof. . . . How shall we sing the Lord's song in a
strange land? If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand
forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue
cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above
my chief joy."

Here in Canada the Americans had their Weeping Wall and daily
cried with false, gallant hope, "Next year in Jerusalem!"

Sometimes Doremus was vexed by the ceaseless demanding wails
of refugees who had lost everything, sons and wives and property
and self-respect, vexed that they believed they alone had seen
such horrors; and sometimes he spent all his spare hours raising
a dollar and a little weary friendliness for these sick souls;
and sometimes he saw as fragments of Paradise every aspect of
America--such oddly assorted glimpses as Meade at Gettysburg and
the massed blue petunias in Emma's lost garden, the fresh shine
of rails as seen from a train on an April morning and Rockefeller
Center. But whatever his mood, he refused to sit down with his
harp by any foreign waters whatever and enjoy the importance of
being a celebrated beggar.

He'd get back to America and chance another prison. Meantime
he neatly sent packages of literary dynamite out from the N.U.
offices all day long, and efficiently directed a hundred
envelope-addressers who once had been professors and
pastrycooks.

He had asked his superior, Perley Beecroft, for assignment in
more active and more dangerous work, as secret agent in
America--out West, where he was not known. But headquarters had
suffered a good deal from amateur agents who babbled to
strangers, or who could not be trusted to keep their mouths shut
while they were being flogged to death. Things had changed since
1929. The N.U. believed that the highest honor a man could earn
was not to have a million dollars but to be permitted to risk his
life for truth, without pay or praise.

Doremus knew that his chiefs did not consider him young enough
or strong enough, but also that they were studying him. Twice he
had the honor of interviews with Trowbridge about nothing in
particular--surely it must have been an honor, though it was hard
to remember it, because Trowbridge was the simplest and
friendliest man in the whole portentous spy machine. Cheerfully
Doremus hoped for a chance to help make the poor, overworked,
worried Corpo officials even more miserable than they normally
were, now that war with Mexico and revolts against Corpoism were
jingling side by side.

In July, 1939, when Doremus had been in Montreal a little over
five months, and a year after his sentence to concentration camp,
the American newspapers which arrived at N.U. headquarters were
full of resentment against Mexico.

Bands of Mexicans had raided across into the United
States--always, curiously enough, when our troops were off in the
desert, practice-marching or perhaps gathering sea shells. They
burned a town in Texas--fortunately all the women and children
were away on a Sunday-school picnic, that afternoon. A Mexican
Patriot (aforetime he had also worked as an Ethiopian Patriot, a
Chinese Patriot, and a Haitian Patriot) came across, to the tent
of an M.M. brigadier, and confessed that while it hurt him to
tattle on his own beloved country, conscience compelled him to
reveal that his Mexican superiors were planning to fly over and
bomb Laredo, San Antonio, Bisbee, and probably Tacoma, and
Bangor, Maine.

This excited the Corpo newspapers very much indeed and in New
York and Chicago they published photographs of the conscientious
traitor half an hour after he had appeared at the Brigadier's
tent . . . where, at that moment, forty-six reporters happened to
be sitting about on neighboring cactuses.

America rose to defend her hearthstones, including all the
hearthstones on Park Avenue, New York, against false and
treacherous Mexico, with its appalling army of 67,000 men, with
thirty-nine military aeroplanes. Women in Cedar Rapids hid under
the bed; elderly gentlemen in Cattaraugus County, New York,
concealed their money in elm-tree boles; and the wife of a
chicken-raiser seven miles N.E. of Estelline, South Dakota, a
woman widely known as a good cook and a trained observer,
distinctly saw a file of ninety-two Mexican soldiers pass her
cabin, starting at 3:17 A.M. on July 27, 1939.

To answer this threat, America, the one country that had never
lost a war and never started an unjust one, rose as one man, as
the Chicago Daily Evening Corporate put it. It was planned
to invade Mexico as soon as it should be cool enough, or even
earlier, if the refrigeration and air-conditioning could be
arranged. In one month, five million men were drafted for the
invasion, and started training.

Thus--perhaps too flippantly--did Joe Cailey and Doremus
discuss the declaration of war against Mexico. If they found the
whole crusade absurd, it may be stated in their defense that they
regarded all wars always as absurd; in the baldness of the lying
by both sides about the causes; in the spectacle of grown-up men
engaged in the infantile diversions of dressing-up in fancy
clothes and marching to primitive music. The only thing not
absurd about wars, said Doremus and Cailey, was that along with
their skittishness they did kill a good many millions of people.
Ten thousand starving babies seemed too high a price for a Sam
Browne belt for even the sweetest, touchingest young
lieutenant.

Yet both Doremus and Cailey swiftly recanted their assertion
that all wars were absurd and abominable; both of them made
exception of the people's wars against tyranny, as suddenly
America's agreeable anticipation of stealing Mexico was checked
by a popular rebellion against the whole Corpo régime.

The revolting section was, roughly, bounded by Sault Ste.
Marie, Detroit, Cincinnati, Wichita, San Francisco, and Seattle,
though in that territory large patches remained loyal to
President Haik, and outside of it, other large patches joined the
rebels. It was the part of America which had always been most
"radical"--that indefinite word, which probably means "most
critical of piracy." It was the land of the Populists, the
Non-Partisan League, the Farmer-Labor Party, and the La
Follettes--a family so vast as to form a considerable party in
itself.

Whatever might happen, exulted Doremus, the revolt proved that
belief in America and hope for America were not dead.

These rebels had most of them, before his election, believed
in Buzz Windrip's fifteen points; believed that when he said he
wanted to return the power pilfered by the bankers and the
industrialists to the people, he more or less meant that he
wanted to return the power of the bankers and industrialists to
the people. As month by month they saw that they had been cheated
with marked cards again, they were indignant; but they were busy
with cornfield and sawmill and dairy and motor factory, and it
took the impertinent idiocy of demanding that they march down
into the desert and help steal a friendly country to jab them
into awakening and into discovering that, while they had been
asleep, they had been kidnaped by a small gang of criminals armed
with high ideals, well-buttered words and a lot of machine
guns.

So profound was the revolt that the Catholic Archbishop of
California and the radical Ex-Governor of Minnesota found
themselves in the same faction.

At first it was a rather comic outbreak--comic as the
ill-trained, un-uniformed, confusedly thinking revolutionists of
Massachusetts in 1776. President General Haik publicly jeered at
them as a "ridiculous rag-tag rebellion of hoboes too lazy to
work." And at first they were unable to do anything more than
scold like a flock of crows, throw bricks at detachments of
M.M.'s and policemen, wreck troop trains, and destroy the
property of such honest private citizens as owned Corpo
newspapers.

It was in August that the shock came, when General Emmanuel
Coon, Chief of Staff of the regulars, flew from Washington to St.
Paul, took command of Fort Snelling, and declared for Walt
Trowbridge as Temporary President of the United States, to hold
office until there should be a new, universal, and uncontrolled
presidential election.

Trowbridge proclaimed acceptance--with the proviso that he
should not be a candidate for permanent President.

By no means all of the regulars joined Coon's revolutionary
troops. (There are two sturdy myths among the Liberals: that the
Catholic Church is less Puritanical and always more esthetic than
the Protestant; and that professional soldiers hate war more than
do congressmen and old maids.) But there were enough regulars who
were fed up with the exactions of greedy, mouth-dripping Corpo
commissioners and who threw in with General Coon so that
immediately after his army of regulars and hastily trained
Minnesota farmers had won the battle of Mankato, the forces at
Leavenworth took control of Kansas City, and planned to march on
St. Louis and Omaha; while in New York, Governor's Island and
Fort Wadsworth looked on, neutral, as unmilitary-looking and
mostly Jewish guerrillas seized the subways, power stations, and
railway terminals.

But there the revolt halted, because in the America, which had
so warmly praised itself for its "widespread popular free
education," there had been so very little education, widespread,
popular, free, or anything else, that most people did not know
what they wanted--indeed knew about so few things to want at
all.

There had been plenty of schoolrooms; there had been lacking
only literate teachers and eager pupils and school boards who
regarded teaching as a profession worthy of as much honor and pay
as insurance-selling or embalming or waiting on table. Most
Americans had learned in school that God had supplanted the Jews
as chosen people by the Americans, and this time done the job
much better, so that we were the richest, kindest, and cleverest
nation living; that depressions were but passing headaches and
that labor unions must not concern themselves with anything
except higher wages and shorter hours and, above all, must not
set up an ugly class struggle by combining politically; that,
though foreigners tried to make a bogus mystery of them, politics
were really so simple that any village attorney or any clerk in
the office of a metropolitan sheriff was quite adequately trained
for them; and that if John D. Rockefeller or Henry Ford had set
his mind to it, he could have become the most distinguished
statesman, composer, physicist, or poet in the land.

Even two-and-half years of despotism had not yet taught most
electors humility, nor taught them much of anything except that
it was unpleasant to be arrested too often.

So, after the first gay eruption of rioting, the revolt slowed
up. Neither the Corpos nor many of their opponents knew enough to
formulate a clear, sure theory of self-government, or
irresistibly resolve to engage in the sore labor of fitting
themselves for freedom. . . . Even yet, after Windrip, most of
the easy-going descendants of the wisecracking Benjamin Franklin
had not learned that Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me
death" meant anything more than a high-school yell or a cigarette
slogan.

The followers of Trowbridge and General Coon--"The American
Cooperative Commonwealth" they began to call themselves--did not
lose any of the territory they had seized; they held it, driving
out all Corpo agents, and now and then added a county or two. But
mostly their rule, and equally the Corpos' rule, was as unstable
as politics in Ireland.

So the task of Walt Trowbridge, which in August had seemed
finished, before October seemed merely to have begun. Doremus
Jessup was called into Trowbridge's office, to hear from the
chairman:

"I guess the time's come when we need Underground agents in
the States with sense as well as guts. Report to General Barnes
for service proselytizing in Minnesota. Good luck, Brother
Jessup! Try to persuade the orators that are still holding out
for Discipline and clubs that they ain't so much stalwart as
funny!"

And all that Doremus thought was, "Kind of a nice fellow,
Trowbridge. Glad to be working with him," as he set off on his
new task of being a spy and professional hero without even any
funny passwords to make the game romantic.

38

His packing was done. It had been very simple, since his kit
consisted only of toilet things, one change of clothes, and the
first volume of Spengler's Decline of the West. He was
waiting in his hotel lobby for time to take the train to
Winnipeg. He was interested by the entrance of a lady more
decorative than the females customarily seen in this modest inn:
a hand-tooled presentation copy of a lady, in crushed levant and
satin doublure; a lady with mascara'd eyelashes, a permanent
wave, and a cobweb frock. She ambled through the lobby and leaned
against a fake-marble pillar, wielding a long cigarette-holder
and staring at Doremus. She seemed amused by him, for no clear
reason.

Could she be some sort of Corpo spy?

She lounged toward him, and he realized that she was Lorinda
Pike.

While he was still gasping, she chuckled, "Oh, no, darling,
I'm not so realistic in my art as to carry out this rôle
too far! It just happens to be the easiest disguise to win over
the Corpo frontier guards--if you'll agree it really is a
disguise!"

He kissed her with a fury which shocked the respectable
hostelry.

She knew, from N.U. agents, that he was going out into a very
fair risk of being flogged to death. She had come solely to say
farewell and bring him what might be his last budget of news.

Buck was in concentration camp--he was more feared and more
guarded than Doremus had been, and Linda had not been able to buy
him out. Julian, Karl, and John Pollikop were still alive, still
imprisoned. Father Perefixe was running the N.U. cell in Fort
Beulah, but slightly confused because he wanted to approve of war
with Mexico, a nation which he detested for its treatment of
Catholic priests. Lorinda and he had, apparently, fought bloodily
all one evening about Catholic rule in Latin America. As is
always typical of Liberals, Lorinda managed to speak of Father
Perefixe at once with virtuous loathing and the greatest
affection. Emma and David were reported as well content in
Worcester, though there were murmurs that Philip's wife did not
too thankfully receive her mother-in-law's advice on cooking.
Sissy was becoming a deft agitator who still, remembering that
she was a born architect, drew plans for houses that Julian and
she would some day adorn. She contrived blissfully to combine
assaults on all Capitalism with an entirely capitalistic
conception of the year-long honeymoons Julian and she were going
to have.

Less surprising than any of this were the tidings that Francis
Tasbrough, very beautiful in repentance, had been let out of the
Corpo prison to which he had been sent for too much grafting and
was again a district commissioner, well thought of, and that his
housekeeper was now Mrs. Candy, whose daily reports on his most
secret arrangements were the most neatly written and sternly
grammatical documents that came into Vermont N.U.
headquarters.

Then Lorinda was looking up at him as he stood in the
vestibule of his Westbound train and crying, "You look so well
again! Are you happy? Oh, be happy!"

Even now he did not see this defeminized radical woman crying.
. . . She turned away from him and raced down the station
platform too quickly. She had lost all her confident pose of flip
elegance. Leaning out from the vestibule he saw her stop at the
gate, diffidently raise her hand as if to wave at the long
anonymity of the train windows, then shakily march away through
the gates. And he realized that she hadn't even his address; that
no one who loved him would have any stable address for him now
any more.

Mr. William Barton Dobbs, a traveling man for harvesting
machinery, an erect little man with a small gray beard and a
Vermont accent, got out of bed in his hotel in a section in
Minnesota which had so many Bavarian-American and
Yankee-descended farmers, and so few "radical" Scandinavians,
that it was still loyal to President Haik.

He went down to breakfast, cheerfully rubbing his hands. He
consumed grapefruit and porridge--but without sugar: there was an
embargo on sugar. He looked down and inspected himself; he
sighed, "I'm getting too much of a pod, with all this outdoor
work and being so hungry; I've got to cut down on the grub"; and
then he consumed fried eggs, bacon, toast, coffee made of acorns,
and marmalade made of carrots--Coon's troops had shut off coffee
beans and oranges.

He read, meantime, the Minneapolis Daily Corporate. It
announced a Great Victory in Mexico--in the same place, he noted,
in which there had already been three Great Victories in the past
two weeks. Also, a "shameful rebellion" had been put down in
Andalusia, Alabama; it was reported that General Göring was
coming over to be the guest of President Haik; and the pretender
Trowbridge was said "by a reliable source" to have been
assassinated, kidnaped, and compelled to resign.

"No news this morning," regretted Mr. William Barton
Dobbs.

As he came out of the hotel, a squad of Minute Men were
marching by. They were farm boys, newly recruited for service in
Mexico; they looked as scared and soft and big-footed as a rout
of rabbits. They tried to pipe up the newest-oldest war song, in
the manner of the Civil War ditty "When Johnny Comes Marching
Home Again":

When Johnny comes home from Greaser Land, Hurray, hurraw,His ears will be full of desert sand, Hurray, hurraw,But he'll speaka de Spiggoty pretty sweetAnd he'll bring us a gun and a señorit',And we'll all get stewed when Johnny comes marching home!

Their voices wavered. They peeped at the crowd along the walk,
or looked sulkily down at their dragging feet, and the crowd,
which once would have been yelping "Hail Haik!" was snickering
"You beggars 'll never get to Greaser Land!" and even, from the
safety of a second-story window, "Hurray, hurraw for
Trowbridge!"

"Poor devils!" thought Mr. William Barton Dobbs, as he watched
the frightened toy soldiers . . . not too toy-like to keep them
from dying.

Yet it is a fact that he could see in the crowd numerous
persons whom his arguments, and those of the sixty-odd N.U.
secret agents under him, had converted from fear of the M.M.'s to
jeering.

In his open Ford convertible--he never started it but he
thought of how he had "put it over on Sissy" by getting a Ford
all his own--Doremus drove out of the village into stubble-lined
prairie. The meadow larks' liquid ecstasy welcomed him from
barbed-wire fences. If he missed the strong hills behind Fort
Beulah, he was yet exalted by the immensity of the sky, the
openness of prairie that promised he could go on forever, the
gayety of small sloughs seen through their fringes of willows and
cottonwoods, and once, aspiring overhead, an early flight of
mallards.

He whistled boisterously as he bounced on along the
section-line road.

He reached a gaunt yellow farmhouse--it was to have had a
porch, but there was only an unpainted nothingness low down on
the front wall to show where the porch would be. To a farmer who
was oiling a tractor in the pig-littered farmyard he chirped,
"Name's William Barton Dobbs--representing the Des Moines Combine
and Up-to-Date Implement Company."

The farmer galloped up to shake hands, breathing, "By golly
this is a great honor, Mr. J--"

"Dobbs!"

"That's right. 'Scuse me."

In an upper bedroom of the farmhouse, seven men were waiting,
perched on chair and table and edges of the bed, or just squatted
on the floor. Some of them were apparently farmers; some
unambitious shopkeepers. As Doremus bustled in, they rose and
bowed.

"Good-morning gentlemen. A little news," he said. "Coon has
driven the Corpos out of Yankton and Sioux Falls. Now I wonder if
you're ready with your reports?"

To the agent whose difficulty in converting farm-owners had
been their dread of paying decent wages to farm hands, Doremus
presented for use the argument (as formalized yet passionate as
the observations of a life-insurance agent upon death by motor
accident) that poverty for one was poverty for all. . . . It
wasn't such a very new argument, nor so very logical, but it had
been a useful carrot for many human mules.

For the agent among the Finnish-American settlers, who were
insisting that Trowbridge was a Bolshevik and just as bad as the
Russians, Doremus had a mimeographed quotation from the
Izvestia of Moscow damning Trowbridge as a "social Fascist
quack." For the Bavarian farmers down the other way, who were
still vaguely pro-Nazi, Doremus had a German émigré
paper published in Prague, proving (though without statistics or
any considerable quotation from official documents) that, by
agreement with Hitler, President Haik was, if he remained in
power, going to ship back to the German Army all German-Americans
with so much as one grandparent born in the Fatherland.

"Do we close with a cheerful hymn and the benediction, Mr.
Dobbs?" demanded the youngest and most flippant--and quite the
most successful--agent.

"I wouldn't mind! Maybe it wouldn't be so unsuitable as you
think. But considering the loose morals and economics of most of
you comrades, perhaps it would be better if I closed with a new
story about Haik and Mae West that I heard, day before yesterday.
. . . Bless you all! Goodbye!"

As he drove to his next meeting, Doremus fretted, "I don't
believe that Prague story about Haik and Hitler is true. I think
I'll quit using it. Oh, I know--I know, Mr. Dobbs; as you say, if
you did tell the truth to a Nazi, it would still be a lie. But
just the same I think I'll quit using it. . . . Lorinda and me,
that thought we could get free of Puritanism! . . . Those cumulus
clouds are better than a galleon. If they'd just move Mount
Terror and Fort Beulah and Lorinda and Buck here, this would be
Paradise. . . . Oh, Lord, I don't want to, but I suppose I'll
have to order the attack on the M.M. post at Osakis now; they're
ready for it. . . . I wonder if that shotgun charge yesterday
was intended for me? . . . Didn't really like Lorinda's
hair fixed up in that New York style at all!"

He slept that night in a cottage on the shore of a
sandy-bottomed lake ringed with bright birches. His host and his
host's wife, worshipers of Trowbridge, had insisted on giving him
their own room, with the patchwork quilt and the hand-painted
pitcher and bowl.

He dreamed--as he still did dream, once or twice a week--that
he was back in his cell at Trianon. He knew again the stink, the
cramped and warty bunk, the never relaxed fear that he might be
dragged out and flogged.

He heard magic trumpets. A soldier opened the door and invited
out all the prisoners. There, in the quadrangle, General Emmanuel
Coon (who, to Doremus's dreaming fancy, looked exactly like
Sherman) addressed them:

"Gentlemen, the Commonwealth army has conquered! Haik has been
captured! You are free!"

So they marched out, the prisoners, the bent and scarred and
crippled, the vacant-eyed and slobbering, who had come into this
place as erect and daring men: Doremus, Dan Wilgus, Buck, Julian,
Mr. Falck, Henry Veeder, Karl Pascal, John Pollikop, Truman Webb.
They crept out of the quadrangle gates, through a double line of
soldiers standing rigidly at Present Arms yet weeping as they
watched the broken prisoners crawling past.

And beyond the soldiers, Doremus saw the women and children.
They were waiting for him--the kind arms of Lorinda and Emma and
Sissy and Mary, with David behind them, clinging to his father's
hand, and Father Perefixe. And Foolish was there, his tail a
proud plume, and from the dream-blurred crowd came Mrs. Candy,
holding out to him a cocoanut cake.

Then all of them were fleeing, frightened by Shad Ledue--

His host was slapping Doremus's shoulder, muttering, "Just had
a phone call. Corpo posse out after you."

So Doremus rode out, saluted by the meadow larks, and onward
all day, to a hidden cabin in the Northern Woods where quiet men
awaited news of freedom.

And still Doremus goes on in the red sunrise, for a Doremus
Jessup can never die.